A flash, roar, and boom
At age 9, I fled home crying. I was called an enemy of the state during a history lesson on the “Vietnam War”.
When my mom was 9, she fled a bomb.
I feel the thunder, the tremor of that bomb to this day. The quake of that bomb — dropped by Americans to exterminate families like my own made faceless by the American Empire — is loud enough to ripple across lifetimes, leaving behind broken earth and trees uprooted. I, as part of a generation raised by Vietnamese refugees, am tasked with leveling jagged earth, healing and replanting severed roots, and understanding the consequences of American War in Southeast Asia on my and my family’s life as the dust of that bomb works to settle a generation later.
I came to AARW through a workshop on Asian American Activism History hosted at the East Meets West bookstore, a community space and hub for art and activism. I entered the space parched, keen for a narrative different from trite, sanitized ones told to me about the “Model Minority” (which, for the record, is a myth). The room was papered in black-white photos of activists who looked like me — shouting, yelling, rightfully and fabulously angry. Kevin Lam — the first queer Southeast Asian I had ever met and whose energy and politics I admired and respected — looped me in. Through AARW, I came to be involved in the Dorchester Organizing Training Initiative (DOT-I) Fellowship program. I learned about the affordable housing crisis in Boston. Though I had not grown up in Boston, I felt the pain of displacement: before age of 8, my family moved 5 times from home to home across California and Nevada searching for affordable housing; before I was born, my parents traversed lands, oceans, and refugee camps. I learned about the deportation crisis striking Southeast Asian community members across the United States — as though our families were not already separated by oceans and displaced enough? I learned about the ways in which Southeast Asians were resettled in the United States in under resourced communities, helping to contextualize the countless nights my mom spent toiling in a sweatshop sewing past midnight and hours my dad lost to doing mind-numbing assembly line work. Through the DOT-I Fellowship, I grew to trust my own feelings and intuition as a queer Southeast Asian. The hurt and anger in my body and spirit finally felt validated. No one, my family and Southeast Asian communities included, should ever experience this kind of disrespect, injustice, and affront against their humanity.
AARW stands for the Asian American Resource Workshop, providing resources to the community, but the community it has forged is, in and of itself, a resource, a reservoir of abundance and interdependence. AARW gave me the foundations to step into my own power and outlets for that power: from being a DOT-I fellow, growing in my activism through Hai Bà Trưng School for Organizing, attending National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance with AARW folks, canvassing to fight for Yes on 3! Campaign to uphold protections for queer/trans folks, door-knocking in Dorchester to carry out a community needs assessment, standing in solidarity with the Dot Not for Sale campaign, joining hands in the continued fight against Southeast Asian Deportation, and many other moments grand and small. I am proud of AARW's vision of building grassroots power and its work in political education, arts, and organizing. The fight is ongoing. In truth, it has never stopped. AARW is committed to that fight — for the community at-large and beyond — and has helped me find my courage in joining the Asian American organizing movement. AARW has offered me and so many others a space for community and activism, and by consequence, a space of healing. I am not alone in the task of evening dislodged earth and tending to tangled roots. That task — of healing and rebuilding after trauma -- is a story written by all of us and an act carried out in concert. AARW has made collective healing feel possible.
Austin Nguyen (he/him) is the proud child of Vietnamese refugees, an AARW member, and DOT-I Fellow