By Gillian Vesely
For The Diamondback
Junior Kalyn Cai helped bring together about 20 people to not only build solidarity, but also to create an environment for all communities of women of color.
This university’s Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Womxn initiative presented the second annual “Wonder Womxn” Monday night — an event that references “Wonder Woman,” but with a twist.
“For a lot of people, [the ‘X’] is powerful because it’s a symbol of resistance, linguistically … against the patriarchy, in which women are just extensions of men,” said Cai, an American studies major.
Among those who attended the event in Stamp Student Union’s Charles Carroll Room was Asian-American studies lecturer Mimi Khúc, who discussed the concept of filial debt and family sacrifice.
“There are a lot of issues that women of color face, especially standing at the intersections of multiple systems of oppression,” Cai said. “This event is meant to highlight those commonalities as a common ground where we can start building political alliances [and] creating social change.”
Khúc touched on the ideas of Erin Ninh, an Asian-American studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, especially in regard to her theories on filial debt. Khúc described it as a feeling of familial sacrifice and said it is created in conjunction with the idea that parents invest in their children’s success.
“Filial debt is something that permeates the way we talk about Asian-American families,” Khúc said. “Immigrants come to the U.S. and face tons of obstacles. … Immigrants deal with adversity, and therefore children become investments. That is … a huge contributor to this idea of debt in immigrant families.”
After talking for about 30 minutes, Khúc paused to lead attendees in an activity. She instructed everyone to write letters to members of their family, specifically to address “things that you wish you could say to this person about yourself. What would you want this person to know about you that they don’t know?” she prompted.
Fiza Khan, a senior criminology and criminal justice major, took part in the activity and shared some of her letters’ contents with the group.
“This is an amazing platform for people to come talk, especially Asian-Americans,” she said after the event. “You get to meet people [and] hear different points of [view]. That’s exciting. It’s good to get out of your bubble and meet new people and hear what’s going on.”
Khúc also addressed the idea of filial debt in relation to daughters in families.
“None of you here are daughters to be stepped on,” Khúc said. “If you take away nothing else from this event tonight, I want you to take that away.”
Cai mentioned that there are not a lot of spaces for women of color to talk about different forms of oppression they might experience.
“Sometimes there’s an expectation that you’ll talk about race first or gender first without people understanding that that’s a whole part of your experience,” Cai said. “Everything that is racist is gendered, and the things that … are sexist are also racialized.”
