UCLA Asian American Studies Department

Halo-Halo Mixer
2023-12-06 15:30 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Join the Asian American Studies Department and Samahang Pilipino on December 6th for some Halo-halo while learning more about the Pilipino Studies Minor as well as how to get involved in Pilipinx for Palestine. This event is also sponsored by the Pilipino Transfer Student Partnership, Kappa Psi Epsilon, Anakbayan at UCLA, Asian Pacific Coalition, and Students for Justice in Palestine!
RSVP here: https://bit.ly/Halo-HaloMix

Anti-Asian Violence Graduate Writing Workshop
2023-12-15 | CA
Graduate Writing Workshop on Anti-Asian Violence CFP! Deadline December 15th for abstracts. To submit and for more information please visit: https://tinyurl.com/aav-grad-workshop

Winter 2024 Undergraduate Check-in
2024-02-20 11:00 - 13:00 | Young Research Library Presentation Room
Join us for the 2024 Winter Check-in brought to you by the Asian American Studies Department Undergraduate Leadership Committee! We’ll have free food, a raffle for prizes, and good company. Hear about our Spring and Summer Sessions course offerings and talk with faculty.
RSVP here or through http://tinyurl.com/AASDW24Checkin.
We hope to see you there!

Book Talk: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community
2024-03-03 14:00 - 16:00 | West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple, 2003 Corinth Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90025, United States
Please join us on Sunday, March 3rd at the West LA Buddhist Temple for a Book Talk and Signing with author Tritia Toyota for her b! RSVP with the QR or through this link. Read below for more on Tritia Toyota and the discussants for the event:
Book: Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980–2020 by author Tritia Toyota
https://tupress.temple.edu/books/intimate-strangers
Book description
At the end of the twentieth century, many twenty-something Japanese women migrated to places like Southern California with few skills and an overall lack of human capital. These women, members of the shin Issei community, sought economic opportunities unavailable to them in their homeland.
In Intimate Strangers, shin Issei women tell stories of precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality, first in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and later in the United States, where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship.
Intimate Strangers charts the experiences of shin Issei lives: their existence in Japan prior to migration, their motivations for moving to the United States, their settlement, and their growing awareness of their place in American society. Toyota chronicles how these resilient young women became active agents in circumventing social restrictions to fashion new lives of meaning. The Nikkei community (Americans of Japanese ancestry who were born in the United States) has been transformed by the inclusion of shin Issei, and Toyota describes the tensions around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and the possibility of common belonging. Intimate Strangers is a perceptive study of migration and community incorporation enacted around cultural differences and processes.

Speaker
Tritia Toyota is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and is a Research Scholar at the Asian American Studies Center with the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging. She also wrote and produced the documentary Asian America. She is a recipient of the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association.

Discussants
Valerie Matsumoto is the UCLA George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress and Community and a Professor of History and Asian American Studies. She is the author of “City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950” and “Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982” and co-editor of the essay collection “Over the Edge: Remapping the American West”. She is the recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, among several teaching and mentoring awards from faculty colleagues and students at UCLA.

Yasuko Takezawa is a Visiting Professor serving as the Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations with UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for 2023-2024. She is also a Professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, which she retired from in 2023. She is president of the Japanese Association of Migration Studies, and a member of the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). After her award-winning first book on the transformation of ethnicity among Japanese Americans which focused on their war-time incarceration and redress, her research interests shifted from ethnicity to race. Over the past two decades, Professor Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects. She has earned a reputation as the leading scholar in race studies in Japan.

Books will be on sale at event for book signing by author after program. Prefer payment by credit card – Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover.

Sponsored by:
Japanese Institute of Sawtelle
Sawtelle Japantown Association
West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple
West Los Angeles United Methodist Church
Asian American Studies Center – University of California Los Angeles
UCLA Asian American Studies Department
UCLA Nikkei Student Union

The Manicurist's Daughter: A Memoir Reading with Susan Lieu
2024-04-04 17:00 - 18:20 | MS 5200, 520 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Please join us in welcoming writer and performance artist Susan Lieu, who will read from her new book, The Manicurist’s Daughter–an emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream and a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery. The Manicurist’s Daughter is much more than a memoir about grief, trauma, and body image. It is a story of fierce determination, strength in shared culture, and finding your place in the world. Books will be available for purchase at the event.
Susan Lieu is a Vietnamese-American author, playwright, and performer who tells stories that refuse to be forgotten. A daughter of nail salon workers, she took her award-winning autobiographical solo show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother on a ten-city national tour, with sold-out premieres and accolades from the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and American Theatre. Eight months pregnant, she premiered her sequel, OVER 140 LBS, at ACT Theatre. The Manicurist’s Daughter is her first book.

Starry Field: a Memoir of Lost History
2024-05-02 17:00 - 18:30 | Rolfe 3126, Los Angeles, CA, 90095
Join the UCLA Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group in discussing Margaret Lee’s newest book Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History. Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History is a poignant memoir by journalist Margaret Juhae Lee, who sets out on a search for her family’s history lost to the darkness of Korea’s colonial decades, and contends with the shockwaves of violence that followed them over four generations and across continents. Combining investigative journalism, oral history, and archival research, Margaret reveals the truth about the grandfather she never knew. What she found is that Lee Chul Ha, her grandfather who left her grandmother and two young sons in 1936, was not a source of shame; he was a student revolutionary imprisoned in 1929 for protesting the Japanese government’s colonization of Korea. He was a hero—and eventually honored as a Patriot of South Korea almost 60 years after his death. But reclaiming her grandfather’s legacy, in the end, isn’t what Margaret finds the most valuable. It is through the series of three long-form interviews with her grandmother that Margaret finally finds a sense of recognition she’s been missing her entire life. A story of healing old wounds and the reputation of an extraordinary young man, Starry Field bridges the tales of two women, generations and oceans apart, who share the desire to build family in someplace called home.
Location: UCLA Rolfe 3126
When: May 2nd, 2024 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM (reception to follow)
Margaret Juhae Lee is an Oakland-based writer and a former literary editor of The Nation magazine. She has been the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University, and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation. She is also a Tin House scholar, and has been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, the Anderson Center, and Mineral School. In 2020, she was named “Person of the Year” by the Sangcheol Cultural Welfare Foundation in Kongju, South Korea, for her work in honoring her grandfather, Patriot Lee Chul Ha. Her articles, reviews, and interviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and The Rumpus.
Purchase a copy of the book here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/starry-field-a-memoir-of-lost-history-margaret-juhae-lee/20141983?ean=9781685890933

No-No Boy in Concert at UCLA
2024-05-02 18:00 - 19:30 | UCLA Fowler Amphitheater, 308 Charles E Young Dr N, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
Ticket reservations are required. Doors open at 5:30PM. Concert will start at 6PM.

Please bring a blanket to sit in the grass area to enjoy the live concert!
No-No Boy is an immersive concert experience that illuminates hidden Asian American histories through folk songs, sound pieces, live projections, and storytelling. NPR Music has hailed it as “one of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear which re-examines americana with devastating effect… An act of revisionist subversion.” Taking inspiration from his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War as well as many other stories of Asian American experience, Nashville-born songwriter and scholar Julian Saporiti has transformed his years of doctoral study into an innovative project that bridges a divide between art and scholarship. This performance will celebrate No-No Boy’s third full-length LP EMPIRE ELECTRIC released by the Smithsonian Folkways label.
Sounds contain histories and prophecies. If you listen closely, there are winding tales to be found in a string brushed by a handmade bow, worlds to be uncovered in the trill of a bird about to take flight, and truths to be reckoned with in the grain of an unknown voice. This is the revelation at the core of Empire Electric, the third album by No-No Boy, and its songs that examine narratives of imperialism, identity, and spirituality. It tells stories rooted in years of research and relationship-building, made vibrant and profound through a rich congregation of instrumental, environmental, and electronically manipulated sounds from Asia and America. Every single sound, from the gracious swell of a pedal steel to the warbling pluck of a koto, becomes a part of the poetic recasting of shared post-colonial trauma and the startling joys that can be wrung out of that hardship.
https://www.nonoboyproject.com
Dr. Julian Saporiti was born and raised in Nashville, TN. He enjoys making music, encountering the arts, and exploring the outdoors. He currently lives in Portland, OR with his wife and collaborator Emilia Halvorsen Saporiti.

A Conversation with No-No Boy
2024-05-23 14:30 - 15:15 | Online via Zoom
No-No Boy illuminates hidden Asian American histories through folk songs, sound pieces, live projections, and storytelling. NPR Music has hailed it as “one of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear which re-examines americana with devastating effect… An act of revisionist subversion.” Taking inspiration from his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War as well as many other stories of Asian American experience, Nashville-born songwriter and scholar Julian Saporiti has transformed his years of doctoral study into an innovative project that bridges a divide between art and scholarship. No-No Boy’s third full-length LP EMPIRE ELECTRIC was recently released by the Smithsonian Folkways label.
Join us on May 23rd from 2:30-3:15 PM via Zoom for a conversation with No-No Boy! This conversation is part of the course “Asian and Asian American Classical Reception” taught by Professor Kelly Nguyen (Department of Classics) who will moderate the discussion with No-No Boy on the themes of fragmentation and creation. Students in the course will have engaged with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and the poetry of Hoa Nguyen and Vi Khi Nao. Their conversation will discuss the legacy of the Vietnam War and the concept and consequences of the myth of Western Civilization and the false binaries between East and West, especially as crafted and wielded by imperialism. No-No Boy will also share his music and experience with diaspora. This event is open to the public.
Scan the QR Code or visit this link to register for the event!

Department Open House (2024)
2024-09-25 12:00 - 14:00 | Rolfe Hall 3333
Come on out to our first event of the school year, the Asian American Studies Department Open House! Free food and drinks will be provided. This is a great opportunity to make new friends, meet the AASD staff, or mingle with your professors. Join us on Wednesday, September 25th between 12-2pm at Rolfe Hall 3333. Hope to see you there!

Westside LA AAPI Labor Leader Panel
2025-05-20 12:30 - 14:30 | UCLA Moore Hall 3340 Reading Room
Celebrate AAPI Heritage Month with a panel of Asian American & Pacific Islander labor leaders from West LA building the workers’ movement and resisting repression, attacks on migrants, and fighting for justice.
In conjunction with ASIAN AM / LBR STD M119XP – “Asian american and pacific islander labor issues” with Dr. Chun at UCLA.
When: Tuesday May 20, 12:30-2:30PM
Where: UCLA Moore Hall 3340 Reading Room

Cambodian Genocide Remembrance Day
2025-05-20 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
In Cambodia, May 20th is observed as the National Day of Remembrance—a solemn tribute to the victims and survivors of the Cambodian Genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime. The United Khmer Students at UCLA invite students, alumni, and members of the Khmunity to join us in honoring this day at our annual Cambodian Genocide Remembrance Day on Tuesday, May 20th.
Together, we will honor the survivors in our lives, reflect on stories of Khmer resilience, and create a space for collective healing and wellness. The event will include an art gallery, a brief historical lecture, and a panel discussion featuring community leaders and activists.

An Asian American Writer’s Notebook: Past, Present, and Future Tense
2025-05-29 17:00 - 19:00 | UCLA Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium
An Asian American Writer’s Notebook: Past, Present, and Future Tense
Join us for the David Nishida and Tina Yamano Nishida Distinguished Lecture and Panel featuring keynote speaker Helen Zia, activist, journalist and author, who will be in conversation with Julie Ha, Journalist & co-director of “Free Chol Soo Lee” documentary and Amber Phung, Journalist with Pacific Ties newsmagazine. The program is dedicated to trailblazing journalist and activist K.W. Lee.
Helen Zia, longtime activist, award-winning writer and Fulbright Scholar, offers insights and observations on current challenges facing Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Amid growing political division and increasing concerns over censorship and free speech, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities are combating disinformation through developing counter-narratives. This lecture and panel brings together activists and writers to explore how Asian American voices are navigating a rapidly shifting political, cultural, and social landscape. Join us for a timely and critical discussion on the role of Asian American and Pacific Islanders activists, writers, and multimedia artists in preserving democratic values, amplifying underrepresented voices, and confronting systemic challenges in today’s charged political environment.
DATE: May 29, 2025
5:00pm Reception at the UCLA Art Council Amphitheater in front of the Lenart Auditorium(located outside the Fowler Museum, adjacent to the Lenart Auditorium).Featuring a new book on saleIntersections: A Journalistic History of Asian Pacific American.
6:00pm Program at the UCLA Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium(located below the Fowler Museum)
Registration: https://tinyurl.com/53y95e8b
Free to the Public

Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination
2025-11-13 17:30 - 19:00 | RSVP for location, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Join us on Thursday, November 13, 2025, for a presentation by Professor Noura Erakat, followed by a panel discussion with Professor Robin D.G. Kelley (Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, UCLA Department of History) and Professor Nour Joudah (Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Asian American Studies).
More about Prof. Erakat:
Dr. Erakat is an internationally renowned human rights attorney and professor of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, with research specializations in humanitarian law, refugee law, feminist jurisprudence, and critical race theory. She is a leading voice on Palestine as the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine and the co-editor of Aborted State: the UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures. She frequently appears on news programs including CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS News Hour, NPR, BBC World Service, and Democracy Now, and has been featured in many major publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, The Nation, USA Today, Al Shabaka, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera, and Jadaliyya, where she serves as a founding co-editor.

Vietnamerica
2025-11-18 14:00 - 16:30 | 2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Join us for a screening of Vietnamerica on November 18th!
Learn more about the film below:
Film Description: Following the wars in Vietnam, over two million people fled to country with the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam. That exodus, referred to by many as “the boat people” resulted in nearly half dying while in flight, battling the elements, starvation, and pirates.
Vietnamerica follows Master Nguyen Hoa as he returns to former refugee camps in Southeast Asia after three decades abroad to search for the graves of his wife and two children. Having fled Vietnam in 1981 on a boat with his family and friends, Hoa was the only survivor.
Executive Producer Nancy Bui of the Vietnamese Heritage Foundation joins GETSEA and 25 universities across North America to watch Vietnamerica together simultaneously and connect via Zoom for a discussion with the filmmaker about the Vietnamese diaspora, their struggle, and how Master Hoa’s story is a prism to see the larger group.
For more information on the film, visit http://vietnamericamovie.org.
