Fighting for Greater Asian-American Representation in Media and Education

Albert Zhou: Thank you so much for having me here today.

Wharton Global Youth: It’s great to have you. Let’s get started. I would like to start with a very basic question. Can you define the Asian-American demographic for us? Who does that include? And also, give us the context of New Jersey? Does your high school have a large Asian-American community?

Albert: Being Asian American just means any American that has any sort of Asian ethnicity. This obviously encompasses a wide variety of people from immigrants from Asia, who are living here now, to people who, like myself, were born in America, but have Asian ancestors that at some point immigrated over here. It includes East Asians and South Asians and people of mixed descent. But basically, anybody who identifies as an American but also identifies with their Asian background, descent and ethnicity. So, to contextualize it. In my experience growing up in New Jersey, I went to a school district that had a very high Asian population — West Windsor, New Jersey. And to be honest, Asian American was actually the majority of my student population. And so, for me growing up Asian American never seemed abnormal to me, because everyone around me looked like me, had the same lived experiences as me, celebrated the same holidays as me. Around high school, when I applied to [private] high school and I got to my current high school, Princeton Day School, I experienced a sudden dramatic increase. Asian Americans were somewhat underrepresented in my high school, they were a smaller population in my new school. And so for me, it was a drastic change in my life. I never felt like a minority before, I never had seen so many people that didn’t have the same experiences as me. That definitely played a role in me joining the Hear Our Voices team and me trying to push for more Asian representation in media.

Wharton Global Youth: I want to hear more about Hear Our Voices. You and Kyler Zhou are among the two founders of Hear Our Voices, a magazine specifically dedicated to raising awareness of the Asian-American experience through writing and art. What inspired this project in 2020? Was it in response to the hate and hostility toward Asian Americans that surfaced during the pandemic?

Albert: You actually got it; you nailed it. It was directly in response to the rise in hate crimes and hostility toward Asian Americans that came with the rise of the pandemic. I remember, when the pandemic had first started, my mom was extremely paranoid. She said that people who look like us going out in public during the pandemic was an easy way to get targeted, to become a victim. We were seeing stories night after night on the news of Asian women who were being pushed to death on the subway, or another Asian shop owner being assaulted, while people screamed racial slurs and blamed the pandemic on them. So, for a lot of Asian Americans, like myself, it was a very, very scary time. And we felt that we were at risk and we were a targeted group.

I remember one day Kyler texted me out of the blue and he said, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Can we chat sometime?’ We hopped on a Zoom meeting, because obviously this was the pandemic. And he told me that he had an idea for a magazine. He had always been into journalism and he wanted to be able to project his voice. He said he wanted to be able to respond to the rise of hate crimes that we were seeing toward Asian Americans. And he had the idea for the magazine saying simply ‘Hear Our Voices.’ Hear Asian-American voices. We initially started with monthly issues. He wanted to publish monthly issues that would simply include news about Asian Americans and poems about the Asian American experience and short stories from different authors. It started off very simple. We just wanted to share our stories and share experiences with as many people as possible and to feel empowered in a way and to feel that there were people out there who cared about the Asian-American experience. But we couldn’t have predicted that over the next few months, it would grow into so much more.

Wharton Global Youth: I’m really eager to talk to you about that growth. Before we do. I’m hoping we can stay with this just a little bit more, because I want to understand better what it was like for you and your classmates and your friends and your family during those dark times of the pandemic. Did it evoke anger? What kinds of emotions did that bring up in you?

Albert: I think most of all, it simple evoked fear. It was quite scary. A lot of my classmates and I would see videos of hate crimes being committed live. I think social media has really sensationalized a lot of things now and so it’s so accessible to see horrific incidents happening. It’s difficult to see someone who looks like you, who probably has a lot of shared experiences, go through terrible, terrible things. You can’t help but imagine: what if that’s me next? It felt unfair to me, especially because people were blaming all Asians for the Coronavirus pandemic, when really there was simply nothing that we could have done about it. A lot of us had family that was suffering from COVID. I had family back home in China that had contracted COVID and were living through really, really difficult conditions. To see absolutely no sympathy toward that and instead, to see all this hate and violence and crime toward us was very difficult. Hear Our Voices was simply a vehicle for us to say, we’re not going to just sit back and take the abuse and violence that we’re seeing. I think traditionally in media, there can be a lot of stereotypes about Asian Americans being more submissive and not very vocal about their opinions and their voices. And they’re not really represented in politics and media and that type of stuff. Hear Our Voices was our way of saying the hate has to stop. We want to take action against it. We don’t want to just sit back and watch all this unfold.

Wharton Global Youth: As you just said, you initially rallied a group of like-minded classmates and friends from your community. But then you began to think nationally. What prompted you to want to expand? And can you also tell us more about how speaker events helped you to extend the reach of Hear Our Voices across the U.S.?

Albert: We realized at some point about five, six months into this whole process that our team was very New Jersey-based, which made sense because we were from New Jersey, and there was a large Asian community in New Jersey, as I mentioned before, but there were so many Asian Americans out there that we felt we just weren’t touching with our work and that we weren’t impacting their lives. And so, we wanted to be able to give them a chance to see our content and to see themselves represented in media through a group like us. One of the ways we went about this, and you touched on this, was speakership events. We invited notable Asian-American figures in the community to come and simply give speeches and Q&A sessions and talk about their experiences or whatever else they wanted to talk about. And then we would advertise these all over social media; all over Instagram, all over WeChat, and on different platforms. And we were able to bring in a lot of people.

I remember our very first leadership event was with Benny Luo, who was the founder of NextShark, which is another journalism Princeton Prize in Race Relations. Well, Kyler won the Princeton Prize in Race Relations. And that gave us a $1,000 stipend to pursue a lot of different things. The biggest thing was simply upping our social media. Social media is such a huge marketing trend now. There’s been a huge boom in digital content creation, digital marketing and Instagram allows you for a small fee to pay for all these different promotions that you can get and to get featured in advertisements and to have more user analytics. That helped us a lot. We revamped our website. Can you find another poem, passage or piece of artwork that affects you? Explain how.

Why is it important (or not) to include Asian-American history in U.S. history curricula?