Affinity Networks Asian/Pacific/American Studies Senior Thesis Panel

- Thank you all so much for coming. My name is Karen. I use she/her pronouns. I'm a sophomore English major. And I'll be moderating the conversation today between me and our three wonderful seniors who wrote a thesis in AP studies this year. I do wanna talk about the founding of this symposium. This is our fourth annual seniors thesis symposium, and so we will be having a moderated conversation with seniors from the class of 2023 on the research thieve conducted over the past year in the field of Asian Pacific American studies. This year we also celebrate the generous donations of alumni in funding the inaugural Franklin S. Odo prize, which will be awarded annually to a senior who has produced an outstanding thesis in the area of Asian Pacific American studies. This prize is named an honor of Professor Odo, in recognition of his foundational contributions to the field of APA studies, as well as his extraordinary dedication to the students of Amherst College. All right, we're going to ask a couple of questions to the audience first, so please raise your hand if you were able to learn anything about Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders in a class at Amherst. Okay, a couple of hands. Raise your hand if you took a class dedicated to APA studies. Okay, fewer hands. Okay. Can anyone who raised their hand share their experiences about taking a class that was either dedicated to AP studies or did touch on AP studies? Yeah.

- [Attendee] I'm taking a class in writing with Professor Myint right now, a lot of us are. And yeah, it's been really cool being exposed to a lot of Asian American authors that we also get to meet and ask questions in in class. So yeah, I really enjoy that class.

- Very cool. Yeah, I'm also in that class as well. Anyone else? Okay. I can talk a little bit about my experience about taking AP studies classes. So I've taken two so far, one with Professor Peralta, a history of Asian American women, and I'm also currently taking Asian American writing with Professor Myint. And I found them both incredibly helpful in my college journey or just my educational journey at Amherst and also beyond. I feel like learning about these experiences give the grammar to articulate what I've lived through and the lived experiences of my friends, of family, of my community, local and beyond. So I wanna stress the importance of having AP studies classes now and forevermore as we work towards implementing an AP studies major at Amherst College. Okay, now with that being said, I want to introduce our three lovely seniors today. So can we start with Jacqueline?

- Do I do it myself? Okay. I'm Jacqueline Kim. I'm a senior English major. I wrote a creative thesis. I use she/her her pronouns and I'm from Austin, Texas.

- [Karen] And then Steven.

- Hello, I'm Steven Yu. I am a biology and English major and I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. And I wrote a hybrid thesis which incorporates critical and creative form.

- [Karen] And Meenakshi.

- Hi, I'm Meenakshi. I use she/her her pronouns. I'm a history and environmental studies major. I'm from Columbus, Ohio and I wrote a thesis looking at, yeah, it's a critical thesis in the history department.

- [Karen] Okay, great. Then we're going to get started with Jacqueline's thesis.

- Hey. Hi, everybody. So I wrote a creative thesis, it's a novella. It's called "A Swift Boat, A Wild Sea." And I can explain the title later. But my advisor was Professor Thirii Myint, who I think a lot of us know. But the synopsis is a very short Korean American and a very tall Korean become friends in Oxford, England. So the two girls, Nam Haeyoon and Yun Noa, navigate very many things during their time together. What are those things? So first, the fact of being in Oxford. So their encounters with literature and elitism, whiteness and friendships. So when I was abroad at Oxford, the thing that most stuck with me was how weirdly fast, short, and intimate and intense we kind of friendships with essentially strangers become when we're like kind of in a new space for like a short amount of time. So I just kind of wanted to enshrine my feelings and what I learned in creative writing. And then the other thing is kind of the transition from girlhood to womanhood. So in this case, they're both Korean and so just talked about the vocabulary available to Koreans who can speak it, and also the physical appearance of it, music, sex and masturbation, and family and childhood, and kind of how those things shape how we become from girls to women. So my goals and interests for this story was first, I wanted to have kind of show that you can have transformative moments within very quotidian kind of interactions. And so one thing that I insisted on with this story was that there's no tragedies. I know like there's like a lot of really famous kind of Asian-American literature out there such as Ocean Vuong's work and and other people who talk about kind of quite dark things that kind of affected them and how it shapes their identity as Asian Americans. But I didn't want that and I also didn't want any drama or any of the story to be driven by the fact that they're Korean at all. So they are just Korean people who go through life, but it's not supposed to actually affect the story in terms of plot. I also wanted to explore what are our obligations to our friends, just 'cause tho that one seems a little bit less kind of delineated by society than, for example, obligations between romantic partners, between parents and children. And so yeah, kind of moving towards like a philosophy of friendship through this story. Whiteness in Korea versus whiteness in America and how depending on where you grow up, your relationships with that. And then community tasks or just like the spirit of community that you experienced through, sometimes sublime moments. In this case they went to a concert and that was their community task there. So some things I read, it's kind of un-intuitive. I didn't actually read that much Asian American literature for this. I read "The Brothers Karamazov," which I actually modeled much of my story after the privileged poor, uses of the erotic severance, whiteness as property, and my diaries. I journal a lot and so at Oxford I wrote down my experiences and, if you look over here it says, "That was so stressful and difficult and intense. I hate it here." And that kind of drove my literature in the elitist portion of my story. So yeah, I guess I can read a couple of parts from my thesis. So I have four kind of excerpts here and some of them have... I'll demonstrate a use of Korean in them. But this one is... Yeah, so Haeeun is the Korean American. Noa is the Korean. And so, "What's your favorite book? Noa's eyes lit up and made Haeeun glad that she asked the question. 'To the Lighthouse,' I think, she said brightly. Haeeun had in fact read 'To the Lighthouse' twice and had come full circle from at first being mesmerized by the shimmery language of modernism and the loveliness of Mrs. Ramsey, to realizing the book was essentially a whole lot of nothing, and that Mrs. Ramsey was just a meddling terror, some busy body complacent in her own misery. During her two years at Oxford, she had gone from being completely intimidated by Ivory Tara jargon and learning how to speak the language to thinking it insulting to real intelligence and actually a sign of insecurity, mere grandiloquence. She didn't see a point to a book so impossible to read." And something that I did in my thesis was use a bunch of romanized Korean words when I kind of encountered a reason to use them. And instead of providing denotations to what I use, I use connotation to just kind of let it speak for itself. Like why would I use this word as opposed to some English translative equivalent. And so from this sentence, "Rather, she seemed to see past every flaw and pass her willfully accepting the person as they stood in front of her and embracing every part, asking no intrusive questions or forcing any self-confrontation, just being a non-judgmental, person to trust and be around." And then I would footnote it and say ... I would explain what it is, means protein. So it usually describes dishes that are hearty and simple, but this word can also be used to describe non-food things, and in that case it means something healthy and solid. And then sometimes the definition is not even a definition, it's just like, "Haeyoon even felt a mix of emotions then, but they all canceled each other out and became just one neutral feeling." And in this case just means something along the lines of you can't quite put your finger on it. There is no English translation and so I kind of worked around that there. And then I'll read one final thing. And I think this passage culminates by exploration of the obligations between friends. So for context, Haeyoon and Noa are at a dinner, some guy joins them, the guy has read a book that Haeyoon actually likes, and Noa has not read the book. So at some point Haeyoon became aware that Noa had said nothing during the conversation, and it occurred to her that maybe Noa hadn't read the book. "She felt a little bad that Noa was left out, but she was having such a good time talking about "The Brothers Karamazov" that she didn't really want to stop. She assumed Noa would join in if she wanted to. So Max and Haeyoon went on gleefully, pausing only to take large swings of wine. And the more Haeyoon drank, the easier it was not to care. 'Am my brother Dimitri's keeper? Ivan had asked Aliosha angrily.' I am not Noa's keeper." Yeah. So that was my thesis. Thank you.

- Yeah, that was a really great presentation. I just wanted to ask one quick question before we move on to Steven's thesis. And it's a simple question. I wanted to ask what drew you to a creative thesis and specifically the novella form?

- Yeah. So I've just kind of always been somebody who likes creative writing as opposed to critical. And so when I was presented with the two choices, I kind of was like, "Oh yeah, the creative one just makes a lot more sense to me." The novella is just a form that I'm most familiar with too. So I guess like if you're embarking on a thesis, you should definitely go with something that you have a little bit of a background in. So in this case, I don't have a background in poetry, so I wouldn't choose to write a poetic thesis. And yeah, I think that creative writing just as much as critical is a form of knowledge production. Actually after I wrote this thesis, I went back and looked at my draft, and I realized I'm finding things that I learned in dilemmas of diversity or feminist theory or the decolonial love. And so I'm like seeing all the stuff that I learned about there without even having tried. And a lot of the research happens after your first draft. So yeah, I think creative writing is a form of knowledge production, and that's kind of why I chose to do that. It's also, I think, it's a lot more fun.

- [Karen] Yeah. Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Okay, we're going to move on to Steven's thesis.

- Hello. I wrote a thesis that is a combination. It's mainly critical work, but it also involves a lot of family narrative and personal accounts with friends and people from many places. So I wrote a thesis called "Asian American Space-Time: Navigating Literature, Geography, and History." And it's based off several years of coursework, mainly in Asian American writing with Thirii Myint and a class with Barry O'Connell called Reimagining American Literature. My thesis focuses on two books, one chapter on each book. The first chapter focuses on Charles Yu's "Interior Chinatown," which won the National Book Award a couple years ago, but it's a book that isn't really written about... It has reached this point of winning the National Book Award to kind of inching its way into American canon or an Asian American canon. But it's still a book that isn't really written about. And the second chapter is... And it's a novel written in a screenplay format. And the second chapter is on "Names for Light" by Thirii Myint, and it's a non-fiction work about her family history, and it's a very airy book filled with empty spaces and blank pages and disconnected pages. But the two chapters that I write... Oh, the question that I have is, what is Asian America? Is that a question that we can really answer? Because Asian America is an umbrella term coined in 1968 in order to kind of put Asian Americans into one category. But what is the impact of that? Does that lead to a sense of community or does that also create a divide where we start to neglect the individual characteristics of all these groups that make up Asia? So what is Asian and America? Can we really answer that? And these are a lot of questions I was thinking about when writing my thesis. In Asian American writing, we read a book called "The Sky Isn't Blue" by Janice Lee. And she came to visit our class and someone asked her the question, what do you consider home? And home is a place that many people have different answers for. Is it family? Is it friends? Is it a physical space? Is it an emotional attachment? And the themes of my thesis are, what places are Asian-Americans allowed to occupy in America? So my thesis focuses a lot on both what we consider these physical canonical spaces, the ethnic enclave, suburbia, Asia, the United States, Hollywood, and the college and university. But I also really want to think about Asian Americans in these non-canonical spaces, or these non-canonical spaces that they occupy, like hybridity, in-betweenness, being on the Black and white racial spectrum of America, the blank spaces that no one talks about, family histories, and the space that we call belonging. Chapter one is called "Stuck in Space: In Interior Chinatown." And to give you an idea of what it's about, here are the subsections on my thesis. We talk a lot about the ethnic enclave, mainly Chinatown, but we talk about Koreatown and Manilatown. The idea of Asian Americans being invisible or generic in American society. What does it mean to be American versus American? If Asian Americans can be considered American. In between a Black and white world. The media world which encompasses Hollywood and film. Suburbia and the creation of a new generic Asian American, that we start to see the emergence of what I call the self-questioning Asian American. You go to college, you reach a point where you're like, "Oh, am I Asian American? Am I Asian, am I American?" So it explores that. And the second chapter overlays time on the space and how do we think of Asia as the foundation of Asian America, the path of leaving due to war, opportunity, or conflict. Family histories and how that shapes our identity, even though it might not be a part of our life, our lived life, but life from the past and life that came up with generations before your family, especially the family history fragments, gaps, and blank spaces. What is left there that isn't told that contributes to how we think of ourselves. And finally kind of a ending of where do Asian Americans belong in Asian America. Now, that's most of the analysis, but my thesis also includes a creative component that is made up of family history, personal narrative, and almost kind of conversations with people that I've met over the last few years. And they take various forms in the thesis, but here's a little glimpse of what it kind of looks like. "I don't quite remember my grandmother's stories. For as long as I can remember stories have been told to me." And those take up various pages and formats. There's a lot left blank, there are single lines. But to me, that is the nature of memory and experience. And then I end my thesis kind of in lieu of a traditional conclusion with a letter or note to the reader. This is a large chunk of it, but the key points that I want to make were there are many things that encompass Asian America, but they're not applicable to everyone. My overall goal was to break down the reader's perception of what America is. In doing so, I've opened up a space for you to think about Asian America, and the future that lies ahead is one that we make of it. One day maybe we will get to converse about our stories through time and through space. Thank you, Steven. Yeah, that was a really interesting presentation. I just have one question about how you would fit your thesis into an Asian American space. Like how does your thesis look like in an Asian American space, if that makes sense?

- I think it's really interesting to think about in terms of... I think the literary genre that we call Asian American literature is one that's ever changing, especially within approximately probably the last five years or even decade, where a lot of the Asian American literature that we know or think about covers kind of like these stereotypical themes that either fall in like the diasporic narrative or the immigrant narrative. But I think Asian American literature and the field of Asian American studies is one changing in order to not really have a set characteristic to it. But my thesis is something that explores kind of the way that Asian American formed through geography and the way that Asian American literature, written Asian American literature parallels lived Asian America. So I think it fits in because it's kind of this modge-podge of everything, of experience, of history, of geography, of place, but it's also something that doesn't fit in because it's funky and it's weird and it's kind of out there.

- Yeah, thank you so much. And we'll go on to Meenakshi's presentation.

- So yeah, so my thesis is in the history department, so it takes more of a kind of historical approach obviously. I'm also an environmental studies major, so it kind of brings together both of those interests, just for context. But the title of my thesis is "Missionaries in Conservation: Foresters as State-builders and Myth-makers in Colonial India and the Philippines." And when I talk to people about my thesis, they often ask what even is forestry and what does it mean to be a forester? So to answer the facts of this question, colonial forestry essentially involved managing tropical forests and who had access to them. Doing this required consolidating state control over forested land, a project that colonial states engaged in to ensure their long-term ability to generate timber. Foresters, or the people who worked for these colonial forestry departments at various levels, were trained in science as well as in law and policy. They're expected to enforce legislation designed to exclude indigenous and local communities from using forest resources as well as prevent private interests from extracting them. So in my study of colonial forestry in British India and the US-occupied Philippines, what I found interesting is that these very questions, what is forestry and who is a forester, were themselves contested. So both the British and US forestry departments themselves struggled to define forestry as a field, and convince the rest of the colonial government that it was a legitimate and necessary component of empire. In this context, defining the field and profession happened across national and imperial borders. Scholars have discussed how this happened through elite white men training in common European schools and then spreading parallel models of forestry, collectively called empire forestry, across European and US colonies. And my intervention suggest that in addition to these elites, those who simply worked for imperial forestry bureaucracies not only served the discreet forest management regimes in different colonies, but were also critical to the transnational exchanges that shaped empire forestry. So I mainly focus on white men who migrated from the US and Britain to the Philippines and India, although I also look at other patterns of migration and the recruitment of foresters from the colonies. So using colonial India and the Philippines as case studies, I therefore argue that, like the discipline of empire forestry, colonial understandings of the forester as a state-builder and myth-maker developed horizontally across nations and empires. And I look at kind of three modes of the production of the colonial forester, both real and imagined. So I'll go through those now. So my first chapter kind of focuses on forestry schools, which generated the labor force that served colonial forestry. And I center the role of schools in the colonies, so India and the Philippines rather than just schools in the metro poles, which are Britain and the US. Kind of in the process of inducting foresters into a transnational community and envisioning the ideal forester. And at schools in both India and the Philippines, there's a tension in colonial discourse because officials imagined the ideal forester as an elite white man. But these schools then recruited from local communities to add to their labor force. And students from these schools traveled across borders to advance what was seen as a global mission, to which forestry was critical. So this quote is just an example. It's written by George Ahern, head of the Philippine Bureau of Forestry and founder of the main forestry school in the Philippines. And he wanted to start a forestry school in China that was modeled off of the one he had founded. So here he's talking to someone named S.R. Sheldon, secretary of the Famine Relief Committee in Shanghai, about producing Chinese foresters as, quote, missionaries and conservation. So that's where the title of my thesis comes from. And this kind of idea was critical to Ahern's larger goal of increasing US access to Chinese timber. So this quote is an example of kind of the central role of forestry education and the production of the forester in the exchange of labor ideas and commodities that characterized empire forestry at this time. So while I think about kind of the literal production of the colonial forester through these schools, I also analyze how foresters were often the authors and subjects of dramatized and sometimes fictionalized accounts of the, quote, life of a forester or life in the tropics. And through travels and tours, British and US colonial officials produced images of life in the tropics that materially impacted their ability to recruit colonial foresters to move to India and the Philippines. And these narratives cross borders to sort of broadly shape understandings of the tropics across empires. So sometimes the images that they produced were literal photographs. So I've included two photos from the tour that US conservationist Gifford took in the Philippines in 1902, on with George Ahern and others from his his party, and another photo of a man next to a tree. And in kind of in both of the context that I analyzed, elite as well as lower-ranked colonial foresters narrated their encounters with people in the forest in ways that show how the forester's life and identity was made through interactions with the landscape. So there were many kind of factors that mediated the interactions between the forester and the landscape. And one such factor was domestic structures, the home and the family. So in the third chapter of my thesis, I analyzed white women, the wives and daughters of colonial foresters, as producers and subjects of broadly circulated images of forestry life. One example of this is a story of a forester named Anthony Wimbush, a forester in British India in the early 20th century, who wrote about how his wife was walking their dog when a panther seized it. And according to him, she had to throw her walking stick at the panther so that it would drop the dog and retreat into the jungle. So the drawing on the far right was actually published in an Australian newspaper, where it accompanied an article telling a dramatized version of the story in which Mrs. Wimbush used her parasol as a weapon against the panther. She was thus the subject of a narrative of forestry life that crossed borders. So in analyzing India and the Philippines, I argue that these kinds of narratives as well as the presence or absence of structured domestic and leisure spaces for foresters in general had material impacts on the willingness of British and American foresters to travel to tropical environments. And in terms of the broad implications of my analysis, the British Empire and India and the US Empire in the Philippines are of course quite different from each other in many ways. Yet I found that focusing on the figure of the colonial forester as a subject that moves across empires, sheds light on how across context there's something inherent about empire as a structure ordering the relationship between communities, nature, and the state. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was really great. Thank you so much, Meenakshi. I wanted to ask you about how your research process was like. Especially since so many of these artifacts are produced from foresters who control the narrative. So how can you prove or like study like the otherwise?

- Yeah, that's a great question. And I think someone mentioned Professor Peralta earlier in our conversation, but she's someone that I worked with a lot in my thesis process, thinking about, and this kind of relates to broader questions that we can talk about more of like how is Asian-American studies related to studies of US empire? And I think, as part of the conversations I had with her and with others, a lot of what we were thinking about was, and with my advisor, Professor Malillo in the history and environmental studies departments, if any of you have had the chance to meet him, a lot of what I was thinking about is that exact question, right, what does it mean to kind of focus on a colonial subject or not a colonial subject, but rather a colonizer as the subject, right, of a thesis. And how do you do that in a way that's not kind of just repeating the narrative of colonial governments. And so a lot of what I tried to do, I think it was sort of on two levels. One was my archive was a colonial archive, and that has to do with a bunch of things, has to do with language, it has to do with access to where I was able to travel and funding and all sorts of questions like that. And so what I was thinking about is, okay, given that I have a colonial archive, what does it mean to read against that archive and analyze those sources in ways that give you information that maybe was not intended in that source. So kind of reading the colonial archive critically. And then secondly, in my conclusion I talk about this a lot, is nowadays in India and the Philippines and tons of parts of the global south, there's a lot of questions about how to manage forests, especially in the context of our current environmental crisis. What does it mean for communities to manage forests rather than the state? And a lot of that has to do with dismantling legacies of colonialism. And so what I tried to think about in the conclusion of my thesis is how can understanding these stories of foresters moving across spaces and how kind of the nature of empires I was saying, sort of works through these people, how can understanding that story help us to then think about dismantling the legacies of colonialism today? So those are the two ways I kind of tried to acknowledge that that's a tension in my thesis and grapple with that question because of reading a colonial archive.

- Thank you so much. Let's give another round of applause to our wonderful seniors. Okay, we're going to move into the moderated portion of today's conversation. So I'll ask a couple questions and any one of you guys can answer. So first question is why did you choose the topic that you chose and why is it important to you?

- Okay, I can start. Sorry, can you repeat the question?

- Yeah, so why did you choose a topic that you did and why is it important to you?

- Sure. So yeah, I think I probably kind of mentioned my answer at the beginning of my presentation. So I'm a history and environmental studies major, so I was interested in environmental history as kind of the topic of my thesis. And like I was saying before, I think it has a lot of... I was interested in forestry. I had written previous papers on it. And I was thinking about kind of what's the value of comparative and transnational studies and transimperial as well studies of empire forestry and its effect on kind of present day conservation efforts. So yeah, an interest in conservation and environmental studies and empire, very broadly, I think, led me to the thesis.

- I think for me... So I grew up in suburbia, in the suburbs of Boston, but my sister didn't have that same experience that I did. She grew up in kind of like low-income housing in Chinatown in Boston. So we have a very different life experience, where she spent a good portion of her life in Boston's Chinatown and I grew up in a working-class, white suburb of Massachusetts. And that's a place that I was really used to for a long time. I came to college and then I met a bunch of people. My freshman roommate who's Korean, one of my best friends here, she's Pakistani. And I also studied abroad last year in Korea, and it was really interesting hearing stories of my friends in Korea who are American-born Koreans who return to Korea and there's kind of this weird clash of identity. I'm too American for Korea, but I'm not Korean enough for Korea. And then I was really interested, especially within like the last few years, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic and anti-Asian hate and Black Lives Matter, thinking about kind of these non-canonical spaces that Asian Americans are allowed to occupy or where they choose to occupy. And the collegiate space is not our space because I believe it's one of the important places of identity self-questioning. So a lot of my life story but also through personal experience through the last few years and through coursework led me to this interest of Asian Americans in space, but also this generational aspect of family immigration or travel to other places, and how time influences a change in a community.

- Yeah, there's like a lot of parts to my answer. So my experience abroad was definitely like a starting point of my thesis, but one thing that I kind of had a frustration with, with existing Asian-American literature was that, like I mentioned Ocean Vuong and other artists earlier, but so much of it is based on narratives of generational trauma and parent issues and suicide and un-belonging and all these things. And I was kind of like, "Honestly, I don't really wanna talk about this stuff." And I mentioned uses of the erotic earlier by Audre Lorde, and I used it as a framework for writing about things that bring me pleasure just because it does. And kind of writing to just say, "Look, people just exist and people have transformative moments within, fraught in kind of flawed friendships." And I wanted to look at what happens when two very complex, kind of sympathetic and petty characters kind of like come together and influence or not influence their lives. And another thing was that I kind of... Yeah, I struggle with the genre of Asian American literature a lot, but one thing that I also did by design was make it so... So my thesis is like... I'm Asian American, yes, but my thesis is about a Asian American and then just an Asian in England. So it's like kind of hard to say what genre it really falls into for me. And that was also something that I did on purpose. I didn't want to box myself in in any sense of the word. And I think it's important to me that essentially, they had this kind of story but nothing bad happens to them. Like the big fallout is they go painting and they're really bad at it. And they... Yeah, looking at the what happens if you stand on either end of rationality and intellectualism versus emotion and pleasure, and how do you kind of come together as two people regardless of geopolitical labels of identity, which I'm honestly not really interested in exploring. So yeah, that was I think my frustrations about some of the shortcomings that I saw in like discourse also manifested in the design of my short story.

- Thank you. What parts of the thesis writing process were the most fulfilling and what was the most challenging?

- [Meenakshi] We're doing the same way.

- [Karen] Okay.

- I think probably the most fulfilling parts of writing the thesis were moments... I don't know if anyone here who's a student is interested in writing a history thesis, but I think a lot of what's interesting is, with history thesis, are moments in the archive where you discover something that you didn't expect or that changes your argument, or that adds to your argument in good ways. So I think an example would be like finding this picture in the Australian newspaper, because basically that involved... So it started out with me just reading. So I went to the UK to do thesis research and I was in the Cambridge University South Asia archives looking at a bunch of narratives written by mostly women, which is where I get to the idea of domestic spaces and gender. But it was mostly kind of white women who were the wives and daughters of foresters writing these memoir-style narratives of the life of a forester in British India in that case. And so I was reading this narrative by this guy, right, that I was describing in the presentation, and he's saying, "Oh yeah, and then this crazy thing happened with this panther and then it got published in this Australian newspaper and there was even a picture of it, and isn't that crazy, right?" So I read that and then as I was writing the thesis, I was like, "I wonder if I can find this newspaper." But I was in crunch time of thesis process. I was like, "I have a few days, let me just take like five minutes and see if it works." And then I found the photo on a database online of Australian newspapers within like five minutes, which shows you how great online archives are. So that was like a great discovery moment for me, to be able to put that into the thesis. You also asked about the most challenging parts, right? I think probably just figuring out the research question I think is pretty challenging. It took me a long time to actually know what am I arguing and what do I have to say? And I think doing a thesis that looks kind of across geographic context also kind of adds to just trying to figure out how do I justify what I'm doing? What's the point of doing this? What does it tell us? And why am I approaching this topic in this way? So I think navigating those questions.

- Yeah, I think it's really hard, I agree with Meenakshi to actually figure your question out. 'Cause when I wrote my thesis proposal, I really want to answer these broad questions of what is home? What is Asian America? And that's something that you can't do in a hundred-page thesis, an 80-page thesis. And there's so many more topics I would really love to talk about . I don't really talk about gender in my thesis. I don't talk about the adoption experience or mental illness, which I think are really important issues that should be talked about. But additionally, I think it's a really hard thing when writing your thesis to think that your thesis doesn't matter, that as you're writing it, you contemplate, "Oh, is anyone gonna read this? Is anyone gonna think it's important? Do I have any authority as a Chinese American male trying to generalize Asian America or talk about other Asian American experiences?" But I think one of the most fulfilling parts of writing my thesis was actually reaching like... Toward the end, I got to talk to a lot of people about it or even while doing the research for my thesis. Or thinking back on these personal narrative sections that I got to talk to people of so many different life experiences in Korea, in America. Right before the thesis was due a week I was in Seattle and I was with a student from Mount Holyoke who's an international student from China and another student who moved to Georgia when he was 10 years old from China. And that's like an aspect of talking about your thesis to another set of people and them being like, "Oh, I actually really relate to this section of your thesis" or, "I really relate to these stories that you're saying or these points that you're talking about." So those moments of, "Oh, maybe my thesis does make an impact even if it's super small" is one that is very fulfilling.

- Honestly, the single most difficult part of writing my thesis was coming up with a title. I finished everything like a week before it was due and then I couldn't turn it in because I didn't know what to call it. So that was honestly an awful experience. But the most fulfilling thing is... So I actually had a lot of fun doing it. I think I was at first scared off by the idea of writing a thesis just 'cause like so many upperclassmen would be like, "It's really hard. You have to start really early in the summer. You're gonna like spend a lot of late nights. You might have to sacrifice your grades in other classes." And I was like, "Oh my god." But it kinda like... I don't know, for me, it was a really enjoyable experience overall. And then when I finished my first draft, revision was also really fun to do, which is like pretty rare, I think. But I had a really good advisor. She encouraged me the whole time. And the most fulfilling parts was when she read my thing and she would tell me what she got out of it, and it was what I wanted to achieve and more, and that was like a moment where I was like, "Oh, I think I'm like doing something as a writer." 'Cause I also felt like this doesn't really matter. Especially because my thesis is not about dark topics like some like other people's writings. And so I was kind of thinking, would people even care about a lighthearted, kind of a frivolous story about two kind of silly people becoming friends. And it turns out that a lot of people do, and the more people that I talk about it, they tell me, "This friendship reminds me of something that I went through." And yeah, so similar like when people make connections with your work is super fulfilling to me.

- Thank you. And then what kinds of audiences might be interested in reading your thesis?

- Yeah, I can go first. So I wrote my thesis specifically to be as accessible as possible, and so I use pretty straightforward language. And then when I do wanna use Korean, I made sure to romanize it so that anybody can pronounce it. 'Cause I think when you have characters, foreign characters to you, and you don't know what to make of it, you kind of skip over and not even try to understand it, because you can't. And so I didn't want anybody to feel like they're shut out of my work. And so everything's footnoted, made it accessible, and truly it's about two people in some sort of space becoming friends. It doesn't have to be like, "Oh, it's only for Koreans in academia." So that was the goal of this whole thing, was like, if you get pleasure out of reading it, that's really all I wanted to achieve. So yeah, I guess it sounds cliche, but it really is for everybody.

- I think especially as a writer, one thing that people always struggle with is the audience that they're gonna write to. And there's a line in my thesis that I write that says, "This thesis is a confession, if you could call it that, of the years growing up as a second-generation American, the child of immigrant parents." So it's weird because I believe that literature or writing should be consumable by anyone. I write in a style that is very kind of not traditionally academic. But I think... Well, writing my thesis, I think it was almost kind of a confession to my parents, or some people would call it a testimonial. And it's a blend of that, it's confession, it's testimonial, it's stories, it's all of these different things. But I think in the end, it's really something meant to be consumed by everyone. But if you're Asian American and you happen to really enjoy it, that's also something that I kept in mind, how this is something meant for Asian Americans to experience. Because one thing that I was exploring in my thesis was kind of this idea of different experiences, different groups having these shared commonalities that bring them together, either be the college setting or something else.

- I feel like as a non-English major, I maybe had to think less about the question of audience, but I think I think for me, maybe I'll come back to some of my earlier responses, just thinking about kind of doing something that I think it's in its own ways interdisciplinary thinking about... I think it would apply to people who have an interest in environment and as I was saying, in conservation, I think it would be interesting to people studying empire and how empire kind of works as a mode of governance shaping our relationship to nature. And I think even thinking about it as an Asian American studies topic as well, especially with kind of thinking about the US empire, I think obviously also broadens the audience and the possibilities for taking this kind of research further. So yeah, I think I've kind of conceptualized it in a sort of interdisciplinary way. I also have kind of a chapter looking at gender, so I think anyone interested in any of these topics could read the pieces.

- Okay. Yeah, thank you. Now we're going to open the questions up to the audience. So if you have any questions for any of our seniors, this is your time to ask them now. Yes, Gabby.

- [Student] So one of you mentioned if people are interested in writing thesis . It's really great for me personally 'cause I'm an English major considering history double major and I'm thinking of writing something pretty much incorporated. So kinda along the lines of someone who is maybe hoping to be in place at some point, what advice do you have for potential thesis students?

- Yeah, I would say being, I think... I don't know. Maybe this is just my own personal problem, but I think understanding what you can and can't do within a senior thesis and then being able to both kind of push the boundaries of that question in ways that I think many faculty at Amherst encourage students to do while also like accepting that the best thesis is one that's focused and that does what it can do but doesn't try to do too much, I think. And that's something that I struggled with throughout the entire thesis process, is like sort of having a topic that's focused. Because obviously writing a senior thesis, it's the longest thing probably most of us have ever written and it feels like this really gigantic project. But then as you're writing it and you're researching it, you realize there's all these other directions that it could go in and then you have to be like, "Oh okay." Like it's actually not as big as you think in that sense, because you still only have like limited space. So I think being okay with that, but then also taking the opportunities that exist, opportunities for funding for research, opportunities to work with faculty in various ways to kind of further your research or pursuing the topic kind of in depth. I think we have a lot of great opportunities here to definitely take advantage of. So I think, yeah, I guess doing both of those things and balancing those things.

- I think time management is definitely a big thing. Also, I recommend choosing a topic that you actually really love to write about. So I wrote an English thesis, but I also wrote a biology thesis too. But for me, the English thesis was actually something that didn't feel like work. It was something that I really enjoyed writing about. Granted I wrote about half of it during spring break. But don't do that. Yeah, just pace yourself and really, if you're writing about something that you truly love or are truly interested in, it's gonna make the process so much easier, because it's not gonna be like work, it's gonna be kind of like this free time or like this enjoyable time that you have outside of utter courses that you're taking as a senior.

- Yeah, I did all my citations in one night, and I would say not to do that either.

- I did too.

- I'd say bother your advisor as much as possible. Especially because I was a creative thesis, if I was going to write this new scene or introduce new characters and I was afraid of how it would shape the rest of my story, I just like email Thirii and be like, "Should I do this?" And she'll like email back and be like, "Just try and then we can like talk about it." And so definitely ask more questions than you think you need to because it's gonna help. Honestly, it's just like a confidence thing. Like sometimes you have to kind of know, "Okay, this is something that I'm okay with doing" and that's what your advisor is for, to be like, "Yeah, that looks good. Just go ahead and try." So yeah, that's what I would do.

- [Karen] Yes.

- [Olivia] Hi, I'm Olivia. I graduated class of 2020. I also wrote an Asian American studies thesis. But something I remember is that I struggled a lot with writing the literature review because there was no Asian American studies theory or methods kind of course on campus. And I'm kind of wondering for you all, did you see your thesis as an English thesis, as a history thesis with like Asian American topics? Or did you see it as an Asian American studies thesis with that kind of primary lens?

- I think first and foremost my thesis, I would consider it an Asian American studies thesis because it talks about... The goal of the thesis was to incorporate as much of Asian America in it as I could. And yeah, it's something that's really hard to do especially when so much of the literature is written by white scholars. So how can I necessarily talk about kind of like this theory in the context of Asian America? And it's something that you really have to work with and you have to make your compromises of like, this is the foremost scholar on the subject. But going into it, this was always kind of like a work of my interest, and it especially stems from the lack of Asian American studies courses that we have here where as a senior there were no more courses I really were interested in or there weren't anything... Wasn't really anything taught about Asian American literature, 'cause I already took Thirii's Asian American writing class. So it was really like... One of the main reasons why I chose to write this thesis was in order to allow myself time to really explore Asian America.

- [Karen] I could not do a literature review, so I don't think I can answer the question.

- Yeah, I think... Yeah, I mean, honestly I think in terms of the historiography that grounded the thesis I was looking at, a lot of it was... Or the thesis I was writing, not looking at. I think a lot of it was in environmental history. Specifically, I think that was kind of the main set of sources I used. But then I think as I sort of continued working on the thesis, there are ways in which a lot of other fields got kind of incorporated into the writing that I was doing. So thinking like in my third chapter that's kind of about the idea of the forest family. A lot of that had to do with... I kind of connected that to literature and conversations relating to gender in empire and the construction of colonial masculinity and femininity and how that kind of operates in both contexts of colonial India and the Philippines. I think there's ways in which, if I were to take the project further, I would want to kind of incorporate more Asian American studies kind of literature and understandings of some of the terms I use and the concepts that I use into the work to kind of further complicate my own argument, I think, in certain ways. So that's something that I would definitely do more. I think that I was... I think also what's interesting is that, at least to my understanding, the field of Asian American studies and Asian American history specifically has also grown and is continuing to be shaped in this time period in which I'm also writing the thesis. And so it's been interesting to think about... I think some of the scholars that I reference who study US empire in the Philippines, for example, would be considered Asian American studies scholars, but maybe wouldn't always have been. I don't know, that's a little bit speculative on my part. But yeah, so I think that's how I'd kind of answer that question, yeah.

- [Karen] In the back and then... Yeah.

- Yeah. Hi name is Evelyn and I'm a sophomore. I think you guys touched on this topic a little bit, but I was curious about what are some important classes that you've taken here that led to the development of your thesis?

- Yeah, I can go first. So like I mentioned, my story kind of I started it after I came back from Oxford. And then after my first draft, I look back on it and realize parts of like my academic experience here colored it, but Dilemmas of Diversity with Ron Lambo in the sociology department that talks about people of color's experience in white institutions in higher education. That was a really great class. Feminist Theory, Decolonial Love, which was a English seminar. Reading the Novel, which I took in freshman year. Even Music Theory that had no literature involved, but just taught me how to read and understand music was like... Yeah. So I wouldn't say there was a single class that didn't really help. I guess except for, I don't know, like Spanish or something. But yeah, the classes that I mentioned, especially Dilemmas of Diversity would be my number one go-to for informed my thesis.

- Yeah, some classes that I can say would be Intro to Asian American History with Professor Peralta. The kind of origin of my thesis was a paper I wrote for Environmental Issues in the 19th Century with Professor Malillo, who is my thesis advisor. He also teaches a class called The Wild and the Cultivated. That's really cool. But that's all if you're interested in environmental history. Also Professor Accola Gomez teaches the making of modern South Asia and some other course which I'm auditing now and some other courses that I think informed a lot of my argument.

- Yeah, a lot of my research interest in English is the literature of race class, gender inequality, and with a focus on contemporary Asian American. And that has been constructed over time through taking classes called Race, Class, and Gender of Barry O'Connell, even though he is a professor emeritus and he might never teach again. But I took Race, Class, and Gender with him. I took two sections of Reimagining American Literature, one that dealt with the pre-conquest to like 1865, and then one from 1865 to the present day. And we read a lot of Asian American literature in that, like classics like . But I also took Asian American Writing Theory. And even some other English classes, kind of like the Literature of Everyday Life or Global Planet in Contemporary Literature of Professor Abramson are actually really interesting classes that allowed me kind of like expand my... One, to think of the everyday as extraordinary and to look at what the mundane details of life can actually tell you, but also think of the world not exactly as... Like not just a focus on Asian American literature, but thinking about the social and global connections of people in Global Planet was really helpful.

- [Karen] Oh, yes.

- Yeah, this is coming back to Meenakshi's comment . Just wondering if you could talk a bit more about how we define Asian America geographically. Does it have to pertain to the US or former US colonies? I'm currently in a class with Professor Bolton, called Americas, that basically argues that Latin America should also be put in the canon, and I was also wondering about Asian and other Western countries, like how should we can categorize that as something else, so yeah.

- Yeah, I think it's referring to what I was saying earlier a little bit, right? So yeah, I can talk more about that. I mean, I also feel like not necessarily an authority on explaining it, but I think a lot of what I was thinking about in my thesis was yeah, the ways in which kind of transnational or trans-imperial kind of interaction is part of the making of... So I can give an example maybe from my thesis that might speak to your question a little bit. So a lot of the people that I was sort of looking at were US government forestry people and conservationists who are really known today as kind of founders of in US environmentalism, right? So national parks and a bunch of other stuff related to conservation and a lot of key policies as well. And a lot of them traveled or went on tours in the Philippines, which I talk about in my thesis. And I think what's interesting is thinking about the ways in which, and this is something that my thesis, if it were to go in other directions, could go into more, is like how are the interactions between those people and people in the Philippines and communities in the Philippines, as well as kind of the landscape of the Philippines. How did that actually fundamentally shape conservationism in the United States? And I think there's a lot of scholarship that I was looking at that really deals with those questions as centering these places rather than thinking of them as peripheral. And so thinking about those interactions and relationships as part of what makes maybe the space of Asian America, I don't know. So yeah, I don't know if that like kind of speaks to what you're talking about. And I think I did the same... Obviously this relates more to Britain than the US, but I was doing this similar kind of interaction thinking about kind of centering geographically and contributing to a lot of existing conversations on this about how the colony is sort of central to interactions between the metropole and the colony, right? It's not just that something is being exported from one place elsewhere, but rather that whatever results is made from the interaction between the two. I don't know if that makes any sense, but that might be how I would approach that topic, yeah.

- Yeah. I think that's a topic I explore my thesis a bit. One, what do you call Asian America or what constitutes Asian America? But at the same time it's something debated because you have your third-generation Asian Americans versus your first-generation Asian Americans. You have people who come here for college or jobs and you spend a good portion of your life in the United States or what else we would consider America. And does that make you Asian American? Or when we look at a lot of the literature, Kusum Ali who is a poet and also a creative writer, he, I believe was born... Don't quote me, but he has a lot of these hybrid identities being living in Canada but also teaching as a professor in America, he spends time in Delhi. So I've talked to him before and he has debated that question of like what do we call like Asian America. Or if you've read like Nam Le's "The Boat." Nam Le is Vietnamese-Australian and he writes a book called "The Boat." He has held fellowships in America. And people have argued is his writing Asian American? So I think it's a very much debated thing, but for me at least in my writing or my argument is that I consider anyone who really has a tie to America to be allowed to have the identity of Asian American allowed.

- I think Asian American is for some reason a very real group or like a real label, but British Asian, for example, kind of is like a little bit less kind of talked about or yeah, there's not really a canon of European Asian literature as in the same way that there is American Asian. So I don't really have an answer to that, but I also think there is kind of a case where questioning why Asian American as a label exists in the first place. One, there's Asians all over the world and they don't really have the same kind of like... I don't know what to call it, like a presence or relevance or some critically looked at label as other places. So I would like to know more. I don't really have an answer, but that is something I thought about as I wrote mine because one of them isn't American, and that kind of affects how they interact with England, so...

- Kind of maybe going off of that, what your response just made me think about a lot of what I was also trying to do in the thesis is thinking about how histories of empire can sort of allow for critiquing US exceptionalism and not thinking about US empire as like fundamental. I mean, obviously there's many, as I was saying, there's many differences between, for example, the British Empire in India and the US Empire in the Philippines. But US exceptionalism also creates the sense that there's nothing that you can analyze across these spaces. Whereas actually there's many things that you can, which is like my thesis also tries to do. And obviously many people have critiqued US exceptionalism. But just thinking about... I don't know, what you were saying just reminded me of that. Like how do interactions across space end up putting people in a common category as people existing across borders and what is that category? What does that mean and how does it relate to specifically someone who identifies with the US as opposed to Europe or whatever? Yeah.

- Yes.

- I'm a history major considering an interdisciplinary major . But I was wondering if you all could tell more about . I guess like starting the thesis and making a thesis proposal, figuring out who your advisor is gonna be and the advisory committee.

- I think the English thesis proposal process is actually kind of one that's pretty defined in stages. So in the spring of your junior year, you're gonna submit a two to three page proposal. And in the English department it's a little harder to get a a creative thesis proposal approved, just 'cause the faculty is a little limited. And the English department doesn't guarantee a thesis advisor, you're assigned one unless you've talked to a thesis advisor and you have them on board. And in terms of the thesis process, I had a little bit of an interesting one because my first thesis advisor, Karen Sanchez-Adler, she went on leave in the fall, and the English professors don't really advise across semesters if they're on leave. So then I got a second one, but it's a lot of like... I think for me, it was a lot of figuring out, refining my thesis proposal during the summer and figuring initially what I wanted to write about. And then you'll set a lot of the foundation in the fall semester, and in the spring you'll type in loose ends, or you'll write half your thesis, and just kind of like start revising and fine-tuning it.

- Yeah. For the creative one, I think they gave you guidelines and so they kind of ask you what questions you wanna ask through your thesis. And the first iteration of my proposal literally was like 20 questions and then my advisor was like, "Let's try to make this more into a story." And so then I changed it to, "Oh, I went to Oxford and now I wanna write about this, and here's one question that I want to think about." So you can totally go to professors that you just like, even if you don't think they're gonna be able to advise you, and just ask them for help. I think I went to two professors to look at my proposal, and they both had different things to say, and then I kind of mixed them together and then yeah, they gave me a lot of advice along the lines of there's not that much space for creative thesis and so here's how to... Yeah, just like kind of what to include in your proposal just to give you the best chances of getting approved. So I don't know which one you wanna do, but there's definitely nothing harmful in going to very many people and asking their opinion.

- Yeah, I would second that. Also, even just throughout the thesis process, doing that. Yeah, my process was pretty, I feel like, similar. Many people approach it in different ways. I just knew I wanted to work on environmental history and I had a relationship with Professor Malillo from courses I took with him. So I just spoke with him, I had a gazillion ideas about topics, and then we finally kind of narrowed it down, and then I put together a proposal and sent it into the department. But I think throughout the thesis process I would second that, that like you can definitely reach out to faculty across campus and they welcome that if you have questions or want other perspectives. And working closely with your advisor, I would say, definitely kind of, and I think people talked about this before, definitely leaning on that support that you have and asking the questions that you have and yeah, taking the opportunity to get feedback throughout the process.

- I would also agree with Meenakshi and Jacqueline, how one, I got around kind of like that creative loophole by writing a hybrid thesis and then yeah, even though Thirii was not my advisor, I actually got a lot of help from Thirii. And then Victor Yang who is a visiting professor right now who teaches the fictions of race or creative nonfiction, he was actually a big help too. So even if it's not your advisor, the professors are more than willing to help you.

- Yes.

- Hi, I'm Gina. I'm a junior and I just proposed a thesis for film media studies. And I want my research and my creative, it's gonna be a hybrid, I think. So I want my work to be focused on Asian American artists working within film. And something that I've been grappling with early on in this stage is if I'm using Asian American as a term or as something to kind of choose and select which works I'm gonna study and which artists I'm gonna incorporate into my work. I don't know, I feel like there is certainly a need to explain what Asian American is, for at least within the balance of my own work, if not for just generally. And this might also have to do with the fact that none of the FAMs faculty have any specialty in Asian American studies or Asian American art or literature. So that might kind of be like a side effect of me needing to explain to them because they're the ones I'm proposing to. But I think just in general, I think it is important, but I also at the same time don't wanna assume any kind of authority on what the term is. So I'm having difficulty trying to balance those two poles, and I'm wondering how did you guys kind of explain that or apply that framework and how did you present the term Asian American?

- I think I struggled with that a bit while writing my thesis, is like what do I actually consider Asian American literature. Or actually write about the Hollywood film industry a bit. So there are actually a lot of movie references to "The Joy Luck Club" or "Everything Everywhere All at Once" or even television, like cartoon versus live. And I think that is like a really complicated thing. And for me, one thing that I do in my thesis is I wouldn't call it I apologize a lot or I kind of a disclaimer where... Like we think of certain words as Asian American, but realistically they kind of fall into different categories too. So for me, I did like a lot of like, "Oh, this is applicable to other immigrant narratives, but we're gonna focus on Asian America here." Or... I'd say do whatever you want. Do whatever you want and apologize later.

- Yeah, I don't know if I have that much to add, 'cause I don't know if I've faced that same question as much in my thesis. But I would just say, maybe from a practical perspective, what we were talking about before about reaching out across departments, if you have faculty in Asian American studies and other departments on campus, I think asking them their suggestions about defining the category. So even if you don't have people who specialize in that in FAMs, you can definitely get that feedback as you're presenting it to FAMs. And then also just reading secondary sources, which I'm sure obviously that's a very basic piece of advice that I'm sure you're gonna do anyway. But definitely I found that in general with defining terminology is part of my thesis. A lot of that came out of just like reading what other people said and how they used the term. And I think honestly, especially for a thesis, just like as Steven was saying, explaining that... Or acknowledging and showing that you're aware of the problems with the terms that you use or the concepts that you're using, goes a long way, right? Because I think there's probably no term that's fully no one is critical of it and it encompasses everything, and so I think as long as you show that you're aware of the critiques and the questions, then that will give you a lot of points. Yeah.

- I also like want to add that you can, I think, as someone writing a thesis, as someone contributing to the field, you can also work, you can also contribute your own authority to it. There's an argument in kind of like the field of Asian American literary studies. I think it's an argument made by Katherine Cha, which is kind of a play on this guy, his last name's like Golanek. But it talks about kind of like this idea of heterotopia and also kind of how Asian American theory as a field is one that kind of borrows from African American studies and how you as a writer, you as someone who's creating something, you are in fact working on the theory, you're contributing to the theory. So if you also wanna take that kind of point of view to it, you are contributing to the field even though you might not feel like you are.

- Do we have any more questions? Okay, then let's give one round of applause again once for our seniors.