Associate Professor Jane Hong and a “dream team” of educators bring 150 years of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander history into focus
Before a group of middle and high school teachers in Cushman Boardroom, Associate Professor of History Jane Hong introduces the story of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American immigrant who spent 10 years on Death Row after being wrongfully convicted in 1974 of murdering a Chinatown gang leader in San Francisco. “This is about the carceral system and what it does to people over time,” she says. “This is ultimately not a triumphal story. It takes a really long time, and he does get his conviction overturned. But spending years in jail is not something he just got over. He struggles for the rest of his life.”
The conversation that follows takes some unexpected turns, leading to a raw and real discussion about the role of a teacher when violence intersects the lives of so many students, regardless of geography. After nine days in class together, these educators are clearly very comfortable with each other, addressing their classmates by their first names as Hong and master teacher Karalee Wong Nakatsuka ’89, a 35-year veteran of the Arcadia Unified School District, facilitate the dialogue.
From July 7-20, Occidental hosted an NEH/Gilder Lehrman Summer Institute that gathered 36 teachers from across the United States, Alaska, American Samoa, and Hong Kong to study Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) histories that they can take back to their classrooms.
“Hosting an NEH seminar on the Oxy campus is remarkable in and of itself,” says institute director Hong, who left a tenure-track position at Seton Hall University to come to Occidental in 2014. “My own background had been at Northeast universities”—Yale, Brown, and Harvard, where she earned her B.A., master’s, and doctorate, respectively. “In the Northeast there isn’t as much attention to Asian American histories.”
During grad school, Hong spent about a year and a half in Los Angeles doing research. “If you study Asian American communities, Southern California has so many scholars and so many archives and resources,” she says. People take your topic seriously, and I loved L.A. as a community.”
Oxy’s History Department “is an amazing community of people because they’re excellent teachers and mentors to students as well as top-notch scholars and historians who publish award-winning books,” Hong notes. “Colleagues such as Sharla Fett, Lisa Sousa, Alex Puerto, Michael Gasper, and Sasha Day have made the Oxy experience even better than I could have expected.”
In 2018, Hong led a weeklong seminar titled U.S. Immigration Through a California Lens, co-hosted by the Spencer Foundation in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “We covered not only Asian immigration but also Latino/Latina migration,” Hong says. Occidental proved to be a perfect setting for the conference, she adds: “It’s very user-friendly and well-located.”
The seminar was attended by 33 California public school teachers, including Nakatsuka, whose classroom is 70 percent Asian.) “Jane put together a great lineup,” she says. “On social media, my big tagline is #RepresentationMatters. When I met Jane, I thought, ‘Oh, the instructor looks like me.’ It’s not like I had not had any Asian American instructors before, but I was at a point in my career that it resonated with me.”
“At the end of the week, Karalee, of her own volition, put together a video compilation with highlights of the week, and then shared it with everyone,” Hong says. “It was an incredible amount of work. She’s really good with education tech as well.”
Nakatsuka’s contributions did not go unnoticed by her fellow teachers, one of who nominated her for Gilder Lehrman’s History Teacher of the Year award. (She won the honor for California in 2019.)
The youngest of four children and the grandchild of Chinese immigrants, Nakatsuka opted for Occidental over Pomona in choosing a college. “Oxy just seemed to fit me,” says the American studies major. “My parents knew I was a small liberal arts college kind of kid before I did.”
As a student at Occidental, Nakatsuka co-chaired the Asian Alliance as a junior, participated in faculty searches for professors of both Chinese and Japanese, and lived in the College’s first multicultural residence hall as a senior. “I became more comfortable in my skin and found my community at Oxy,” she recalls. “It’s been sweet to come back here working with Jane and to be able to experience and enjoy it even more.
Nakatsuka and Hong were texting each other when news broke of the shootings of Asian women at Atlanta spas in March 2021. “Jane’s friendship and guidance as a history mentor, along with this teaching honor and my connections with teachers nationwide, motivated me to speak up during this challenging period,” Nakatsuka says. “All these things helped me to find my voice.”
She ended up going on a podcast with three other Asian American teachers to discuss what it means to be an Asian American. “Lots of people don’t know how it feels to always be viewed as a foreigner—to be asked, ‘Where are you from?’ because they assume you’re from another country, or to be told how you speak English well, or how every time someone goes to have Chinese food they tell you about it. We had a really honest conversation on that podcast.”
In the aftermath of the pandemic, Gilder Lerman approached Hong about applying for an NEH grant on a topic of interest to her. “Initially our idea was to have a conference or institute focusing on Asian and Latino/Latina history, immigration history, particularly,” Hong recalls. The curriculum would be based on two PBS docuseries: Latino Americans (2013) and Asian Americans, the latter of which features Hong. (In the 1960s, the Asian American movement was happening concurrently with the Black Power, Civil Rights, and Chicano movements, Hong notes: “That’s where the term Asian American comes from.”)
Hong’s initial proposal “didn’t get too far, because I think there was too much crammed into one week,” she says. “The feedback was that there was just too much. It was a great idea. People were on board, but it was just too much crammed into one week. And so that was where the idea to have a two-week institute came from. By that point, that was the time of anti-Asian violence and racism. And so we thought that it would be a good use of time to devote a two-week institute to AAPI histories.
In recent years, many states began passing mandates for teachers to teach AAPI history in their curriculum. “I think that also made the case for Gilder Lehrman to think about providing training in AAPI history, because most K-12 teachers don’t have any,” Hong says. “I wanted to make sure we centered Pacific Islander histories because the ‘PI’ part gets forgotten.” At Occidental, she’s teaching a first-year seminar this fall on the creation of the AAPI category.
When her first application didn’t quite go all the way, Hong tapped Nakatsuka to serve as master teacher and sought her feedback on the curriculum and structure, which would ultimately encompass nine guest speakers in the classroom and a pair of field trips. “It was really dense but thoughtfully put together,” Nakatsuka says. “It resonated with people.”
“The number of programs and resources that Karalee introduced to the teachers was phenomenal,” Hong says. “There’s no way this could have happened without her expertise. Teachers know a lot that professors do not, and the skill sets are so different. So, it’s really important to work together.”
“We had 323 applications from teachers for 36 slots,” Hong says. In choosing the cohort, “Among the criteria was are people going to have the opportunity to incorporate these topics into their teaching? Our No. 1 goal was to make these sessions really practical. If you can’t take them back to your classroom, then it doesn’t really impact students directly.”
Over the course of two weeks, Hong and a host of guest lecturers covered topics spanning nearly 150 years of U.S. history, from Reconstruction and the Spanish-American War to the 1992 L.A. uprising and post-9/11 South Asian American experiences.
Hong’s approach to teaching the material closely mirrored her own approach. “In Oxy’s History Department, I’m the 20th-century U.S. historian,” she explains. “But until last year, I didn’t teach any specific Asian American-themed classes. So, when I teach Reconstruction, I teach debates over citizenship in Congress in the 1870s about whether the Chinese should be allowed to naturalize. When I teach 1920s nativism, I talk about Asian exclusion. When I talk about World War II, I frame Japanese American incarceration in terms of the U.S. war in the Pacific.
“It’s all U.S. history, and that’s been my approach from the very beginning. Even if the majority of teachers do not teach ethnic studies, my hope is that they’re still able to integrate these histories into their curriculum.”
“We had the dream team,” Nakatsuka says. “Gilder Lehrman program coordinator Leah Baer was helping us prep before and then flew out and worked with us for the first few days. Even after she flew back, she would man the WhatsApp chat and pop up on our Zooms to make sure everything was well.”
The fourth member of the team was administrative assistant Thea Wilson ’24, a history and Spanish double major from Seattle, who spent the last two years working with the Occidental Special Collections’ Japanese American Relocation Project, with funding from the Grace Nixon Foundation. Wilson wrote her senior thesis on Japanese American Incarceration on the Colorado River Indian Reservation (1942-45).
“People typically think of ‘history’ as a static and fixed grouping of facts and events that happened in the past,” Wilson says. “However, this group of lecturers shattered that stereotype and taught us about Asian American and Pacific Islander histories using unique and personal pedagogies. It was a very humbling experience for me to learn from these wonderful educators.”
Thanks to the NEH grant, each teacher got a $2,200 stipend to offset their expenses. Nearly two-thirds of participants stayed in Berkus Hall for the seminar, “so they got the full Oxy experience,” Hong says.
Despite the at-times humid conditions, “Cushman Boardroom was just perfect,” Nakatsuka adds. “Some people would come early and hang out and chat. It became our home.” The friendly atmosphere was further enhanced by fellow attendees who brought treats including coffee, pastries, and donuts.
From Santa Monica Beach to Dodger Stadium to the Hollywood Bowl, participants took advantage of the sights and sounds of Los Angeles. “There was a group that went to a Missy Elliott concert,” Hong says, and one teacher from Brooklyn, who moonlights as a musician, even played some of his compositions at an open mic night.
On the penultimate night of the conference, Cushman Boardroom hosted karaoke night. One teacher drove an hour each way in traffic to get samosas from Little India in Artesia. Other teaches made sangria in a bowl bought from Target.
“It was teacher initiated,” says Hong, who brought a karaoke mic she purchased on Amazon (although she didn’t sing that night). “They just wanted to hang out. They’d spent nine days together by this point. They liked exploring L.A. but they chose to come back and just hang out with each other in the same room that we’re in all day.”
“It was a really joyous moment—and kind of representative of our two weeks,” Nakatsuka says. “We were learning hard history but we built community so that we had the safety to enjoy it together. And the community forum is still going on. We send each other random things and meaningful things and talk about what we’re doing.”
At the close of the conference, everyone joined in to sing “That’s What Friends Are For.” “That was a highlight for me,” Hong says. “That’s my go-to karaoke song now.”
Top photo: Members of the Pacific Crossings “Dream Team”: From left, Nakatsuka, Gilder Lehrman program coordinator Leah Baer, administrative assistant Thea Wilson ’24, and Hong.
