Instructor Spotlight: Billy Zeng and Nacie Loh

Tell us about yourselves and what inspired you to teach this course

Nacie Loh: I grew up in Cambridge with parents involved in community organizing. Before my junior year of high school, I participated in the City School’s Summer Leadership Program, discussing topics like racism, classism, hetero-patriarchy and other systems of oppression with other youth from Boston and the surrounding area. This political education gave language to the structural power dynamics I was seeing in my life, shaping my worldview and connecting me to other youth and organizations interested in this work. My personal commitment to Boston area community organizing grew over the years through involvement in local Cambridge politics and after high school, interning with the Asian American Resource Workshop.

In college, I have also been able to connect my education with these political commitments, majoring in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora studies. While I’ve loved the classes I’ve taken, each year the course offerings have been inconsistent because of the lack of funding and institutional support from the university for the department. This instability is not new, and students have been figuring out how to mobilize and pursue the ethnic studies education they want to see in this school for years. I take heavy inspiration from students who taught a class on Asian American Boston several years ago, the last time there was a gap in Asian American studies courses being offered by the university. As we are in another crucial moment of scarce course offerings in Asian American Studies and ethnic studies, Billy and I chose to follow in their footsteps to share and create the learning spaces we believe are needed here, connected to our experiences in Greater Boston Asian American communities. 

Billy Zeng: Growing up in an immigrant-majority small city, I have seen firsthand the struggles faced by my own family and other working-class immigrant families. The high school that I attended was severely underfunded and not invested in. Resources were limited, which meant that I had to create opportunities for myself. It was not until I joined an Asian youth leadership development program in my junior year of high school that I was politicized. The program that I participated in allowed me to tap into my own agency and leadership abilities. This program quickly became a space where I learned about my own identities and histories for the first time.

Having grown up in Greater Boston for the majority of my life, I have seen how Asian communities have developed and changed as a result of gentrification, immigration patterns, and general urban politics. I was inspired to co-teach Asian American Boston and Beyond due to my own experiences growing up, but also wanted to create a space on Tufts campus that engaged students in community-based learning.

Your course has some field trips to places in Boston, such as Chinatown and Fields Corner. Can you talk a little bit about these field trips and what you hope students will take from them?

NL: I hope that students can see how communities shape their neighborhoods as well as the effects of outside forces and interests on these areas. Reading about Chinatown and Fields Corner, it can be difficult to conceptualize the scope and impact of events, actions, people, and organizations. Seeing these areas firsthand and learning about their histories from organizations who have been working on these issues for years makes clear the past and ongoing struggle for neighborhood survival and success. What we read and talk about are not abstract people, places, or ideas, but communities that we are a short T ride away from.

BZ: I hope that students will be able to see how ethnic enclaves have been formed. Boston Chinatown and Fields Corner in Dorchester are rich in activist histories, but also they are sites of resistance and resilience to this day. I hope students are able to take away how these communities, majority non-English speaking and working class, make a home for themselves here and how they have adapted to a new lifestyle with the resources available and surrounding them. I hope our students are able to see the value of having a community and what that looks like in practice.

What’s a piece of Asian American history in Boston that students should know about?

NL: Tufts students need to know about our university’s impact in Boston Chinatown. Through the Tufts Medical School and its merger with the New England Medical Center, Tufts owns a third of all the land in Chinatown. It has been key in displacing residents and contributing to unsafe conditions and rising cost of living in the neighborhood since it first arrived there in 1950.

When talking about this history, we need to recognize and honor the tireless work of community organizers in the neighborhood against Tufts. While Tufts continues to try to take land and resources, community members rise up and fight back. For example, in the 80s and 90s, Tufts tried to acquire one of the last undeveloped pieces of land in Chinatown, Parcel C, in order to build a 12 story garage. This land was directly next to an elementary school and senior center, and the environmental effects of this garage and added traffic would’ve been extremely dangerous. Through those years, community members fought the city and university to instead create affordable housing and a community center. Eventually, after years of community pressure, Tufts rescinded their offer and the land was developed by the Asian Community Development Corporation. While this was a powerful success for the community, Tufts’ history of gentrification is an important reminder for us of the way that our university acquires its resources/spaces, who bears the consequences, and how we must hold Tufts accountable and support community efforts.

BZ: College students had a major role to play in forming the early origins of the Asian American movement in Boston.. In 1986, immigrant Chinese women garment workers in Boston were laid off by closing of garment workshops. They were unemployed and were ignored by government agencies. But, after thorough active organizing and community advocacy, these workers and allies won better working conditions such as health benefits and agency over the administration of job training programs that were accessible in Asian languages. Asian American college students in the Boston area were active to support these immigrant Chinese women garment workers and created everlasting genuine and powerful relationships with the community. The tradition of student and community solidarity is so powerful and it is a theme that emerges to this day in Asian American histories across urban cities, especially Boston.

How has your community organizing and activist-lens informed your class?

NL: I approach the class with the tools and knowledge I have gained from various political education spaces. In educational spaces, we all bring our own previous learnings and experiences to the table, and I believe my role as a “teacher” is not to lecture but to facilitate sharing and generating ideas from the group to form collective knowledge. My experiences in youth organizing showed me the importance of understanding positionality: who you are, how you approach the work, and how that is informed by frameworks of power and oppression that shape your life and worldview. From each of our unique perspectives, we all teach each other, and we all learn from each other. Through different collaborative activities and discussions, our classroom seeks to be a community space where we can support each other in our learning and honor different forms of knowledge.

In our readings, rather than approach the subject of Asian American communities and organizing from a purely academic lens, we are intentionally highlighting readings, videos, and materials from many non-university sources which are sometimes not taken as seriously in academic spaces. Additionally, we have not planned this course or built the syllabus alone! I have had many conversations with friends, co-workers, and leaders in the Asian American organizing spaces I am part of to get feedback and advice about creating this kind of education. We also made it a priority to invite some of these people to visit the class and engage in these conversations themselves.

BZ: My own community organizing has taught me to meet people where they are. Political education introduced me to a whole new world of organizing that I had never known before. In our class, I hope to do the same by hosting political education workshops and being intentional about community building. My own activism has taught me how to center the margins and uplift/empower our stories. Growing up, there were so many times I thought to myself that my stories were not worth telling or that my struggles growing up dealing with language inaccessibility, housing injustice, youth violence, and navigating an underfunded education system were to be brushed under the rug. There is power in our stories, and my activism has taught me to center these marginalized experiences in our class. In bringing in these experiences, my community organizing lens taught me to teach others how to unpack these experiences using frameworks of power and oppression. 

Billy Zeng is a junior double majoring in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies and Sociology with a History minor. 

Nacie Loh is a senior majoring in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora studies with Asian American studies and Studio Art minors.