In the nearly three decades during which Asian American studies has been evolving, historians in our field have had to confront the problem of locating appropriate sources for research and teaching. Unlike other fields of American history, there are few archives devoted to Asian American history and for a number of reasons, the primary sources needed for certain types of historical research are either scattered across the United States and Asia or simply do not exist. This paucity of sources in some areas of our field has not only shaped the direction of our research and how we are able to go about recovering, reconstructing, and interpreting our past, it has also affected what and how we are able to teach and the nature of the assignments we give our students. In this essay, I would like to offer some thoughts on the use of family history and autobiography assignments in the teaching of Asian American history, drawing primarily on my experience of teaching at Williams College (1).

Although the intellectual quality of the students at Williams College allows me to assign sophisticated readings and require substantial research papers, I have found that many undergraduates are not interested in historiography or the minutiae of Asian American history. Instead, they are more interested in gaining a broad understanding of the topic, and most important, how it affects them personally. Therefore, I have found that the most successful and meaningful assignments are personal or family histories. This allows for a balance between scholarly inquiry and personal discovery. I have the students get in touch with their parents or grandparents and instruct them to start asking about their immigration experiences, their adjustment to American life, their hopes for their children, and so on. The main guideline is to blend the structural components of immigration with the personal experiences of the immigrant(s) being interviewed. As the semester progresses many of the students begin to come to me with probing questions arising from their research. They ask me if it is possible that their great-grandfathers could have been “paper sons,” if their mothers or grandmothers could have been affected by anti-miscegenation laws, or how to best describe their experiences as a “boat person.” Suddenly, they begin to realize that they have not heard all there is to hear about the family, that they might not even know why they are in the United States rather than in Korea or Taiwan. In other words, they hit upon events and trends in their families’ histories that have had a profound impact on the direction their lives have taken. Both the events and the realization of these events (termed “epiphanies” by one scholar) provide the students with insights that enable them to make connections between their personal lives and the “public record” of written history (2).

Another form of this assignment is to concentrate on themselves, to write their autobiographies as Asian Americans. Focusing on themselves, new realizations surface in their attempts to place their lives in the broader historical picture. Those who believe that they have never experienced racism finally recall those ugly moments in their childhood when they tried to understand the meaning of being called “Chink” or “Gook,” or why they were not invited to parties with their all-white classmates. Despite this focus on themselves, the students become “historians of the present,” a process which allows them to contextualize their lives in the broader Asian American experience (3).

At Williams College, I have given this assignment in both my contemporary Asian American history class and my course on comparative American immigration history. In most cases, the students have embraced this assignment with great enthusiasm. Whereas some students once scoffed at the idea of a family history when I first tried the assignment, they now tell me that they are taking the class because of the assignment. One senior told me, “I want to graduate with something meaningful in my hand, such as the family history I’ll write in this class” (4). In addition, because of the generational and socioeconomic demographics of Williams College, I have a number of students who are very interested in carrying out this assignment in forms other than the standard narrative employed in most family histories and autobiographies. Influenced by a lifetime of watching modern television graphics (from Sesame Street to MTV) and an intellectual attraction to contemporary theory, the students are now producing autobiographies and family histories in the form of videos, photographic essays, extended verse, and physical artifacts. In this last case, the student presented me with passports, clothing, and toys, all carefully wrapped in an archives storage box accompanied by a text which instructed me when to unwrap each object and described each artifact and how it fit into the history of the family’s immigration to America. In recent years, my students have also used this assignment to articulate their identities that extend beyond their sense of being Asian Americans. I have received a number of projects that detail their developing awareness of their sexuality, their bouts with severe depression, their history of domestic abuse, and their acceptance of their bi-racial heritage. To be sure, their Asian American identities and upbringing are vitally connected to these aspects of their lives, but these projects point out very clearly that they do not always privilege ethnicity when coming to terms with their life histories.

I always have a number of non-Asian American students in my Asian American history class and the assignment mandates that they interview an Asian American and record and reflect upon their lives. In many of these cases, the papers are equally revealing as they disclose previous stereotypes they held about Asian Americans which were dispelled after spending time with their informants. For some, this is the first time in their lives they have had direct contact with an Asian American. Previous to the assignment, their relationship to Asian Americans was either in passing or through the distorted lens of the mass media. For others, this project allowed them to ask their Asian American friends questions they’ve held in for years out of fear of treading into sensitive areas. If Asian American Studies is to contribute to the “opening” of American society to acknowledge and appreciate its multicultural heritage, perhaps this assignment is the first step for some of our students.

While I have great faith in this assignment, I am well aware that there are a number of problems with using oral history and autobiography to teach and write history. As we try to uncover and reconstruct our historical past, we have to be alert to the politics of using oral history and autobiography as historical documents. They are, of course, gendered and class-based productions of subjective interpretation, mediated by the historical and social factors of the environment in which they are produced and influenced by the selective process of an individual’s or group’s historical and collective memory in order to present a picture of the past that serves the objectives of the author(s). Therefore, when used as primary historical sources, one must always be aware of the nature of their cultural production. However, these problems can also be used to great pedagogical benefit when assigning the writing and/or collection of autobiography and family histories. By pointing out to students that in writing their autobiographies and/or family histories, they will be creating historical documents, not unlike the ones they encounter in their assigned readings, their awareness and understanding of the constructed nature of historical evidence can be greatly enhanced. For example, when assigning readings such as sections of the 1876 hearings on Chinese immigration, testimonies from the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Quiet Odyssey, Hearts of Sorrow, or Strangers From a Different Shore, their experience in constructing their own historical narratives can provide important insights to their understanding of how these texts are collected, organized, and written. Once they become aware of how they can control how their histories are written, they can better appreciate how other histories are constructed and presented to the reader or listener. With this in mind, I devote a class period to discussing theoretical readings about autobiography and oral history and another class session, usually near the date when their assignments are due, in which the students discuss the methodological issues they confronted as they wrote their family histories (5). In this manner, they are encouraged to articulate their understanding of their role as historians and agents of their own historical circumstances. Furthermore, when they come to apprehend the importance of what they have accomplished in this project, they come to understand the power of the construction of history and the importance of claiming their own stories and voices. They now realize that if they do not represent their lives and histories on their own terms, it will be done by someone else on someone else’s terms, if at all. And, placed against the broader backdrop of Asian American history, they will come to a better understanding that without honest and careful representation, peoples’ whole histories and cultures can be rendered silent, invisible, and therefore, non-existent. Thus by crossing the borders of the personal and letting it manifest in public, our students partake in the political act of claiming their own histories.

To conclude, I have come to believe strongly in the efficacy of this assignment. It opens up students to new insights about themselves, their families, their friends, and their society. It can give them a sense of historical connection to their own ethnic group and to the lives of those around them. As our classrooms become increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation, it is essential that we encourage our students to appreciate these differences while trying to locate some area of commonality among them so there is an avenue for communication. In this case, that commonality is based on the shared experience of living as or with Asians in America. Their research will hopefully show them how stereotypes serve only to reduce, falsify, and invalidate real human lives. We owe our students this much.

As scholars and educators, we spend so much time with texts and ideas, creating paradigms and looking for meaning, we often assume that our students live in the same intellectual environment that we do. More often, they do not. They usually have a set of concerns that do not correspond to our daily lives. In many ways this project helps bridge the distance between “professor” and “student” and “writer” from “reader.” It has often been as rewarding for me as it has for many of my students. Through their experiences of self-discovery, I learn not only about the specifics of their lives, but I get a glimpse of Asian American history in the making. Their stories are what the scholarship of a few years hence will focus on. By seeing what experiences these students have endured and what concerns them now, I have found specific parallels and contrasts to earlier periods of Asian American history. When shown this, the students are more apt to appreciate the lives of those long gone because they have come to understand their own lives as history. I, too, have come to a better understanding of the patterns of Asian American history by placing my own life in relation to theirs. So long as we acknowledge the value of our students’ lives, I believe we can be honest historians and teachers in our research and in the classroom.

Endnotes

1. Portions of this essay were originally in K. Scott Wong, “Our Lives, Our Histories,” in Multicultural Teaching in the University, ed. David Schoem et al. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1993), 87-94. I first developed this assignment when I began teaching Asian American studies as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. When I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a Dissertation Fellow, I was pleased to discover that the director of the Asian American Studies Program, Sucheng Chan, used a very similar assignment in her Asian American history survey courses. Since coming to Williams College, I continue to develop this assignment as I come to better understand the intricacies, limitations, and advantages of using and assigning oral histories as both texts and assignments.

2. Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Biography (Newbury Park, N.Y.: Sage Publications, 1989), 70. Denzin writes, “Epiphanies are interactional moments and experiences which leave marks on people’s lives. In them, personal character is manifested. They are often moments of crisis. They alter the fundamental meaning structures in a person’s life.” I am grateful to Lane Hirabayashi for introducing me to this essay.

3. This phrase is borrowed from the Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method,” ed. Richard Johnson et al. (London Hutchinson, in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1982), 205.

4. Students in most of the classes in which I give this assignment have made similar comments. Quite a few have informed me that their families help with and read these papers with greater interest than any other they have written in college, the papers often passed from one set of relatives to another. I have even received letters from students a number of years after graduation informing me that the person about whom they wrote had just passed away and how grateful the family was for having a record of their life.

5. There are now a number of texts that are based on or are collections of Asian Americans’ oral histories and autobiographies. Some examples include Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America edited and with an introduction by Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Asians in America: A Reader, Malcolm Collier, ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1993); James M. Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Growing Up Asian American, edited with an introduction by Maria Hong, (New York: Avon Books, 1993); Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays From Asian America, edited with an introduction by Garrett Hongo, (New York: Anchor Books, 1995); Joann Faung Jean Lee, Asian American Experiences in the United States (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 1991); Mary Paik Lee, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990); Lydia Minatoya, Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); The Far East Comes Near: Autobiographical Accounts of Southeast Asian Students in America, ed. Lucy Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem and Joel Martin Halpern (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989); John Tenhula, Voices from Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991); and Usha Welaratna, Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Aside from the Norman Denzin essay and the piece by the Popular Memory Group cited above, other helpful writings on oral history, family history, and autobiography include Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 733-97; Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, Paul John Eakin, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 142-70; and Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, “Metaphors of Self in History: Subjectivity, Oral Narrative, and Immigration Studies,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 254-90.

K. Scott Wong is an assistant professor of history at Williams College. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History, MELUS, American Quarterly, and Amerasia Journal. He is currently writing a book on the impact of the Second World War on Chinese Americans.