Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Each month in May, June, July, and August 2020, CUNY FORUM will feature essays; analysis; literary, graphic, and poetic responses; conversations and community resources around the global COVID-19 pandemic and the linked Black Lives Matter protests from comparative Asian American and international Asian perspectives. Contributing writers hail from, or originate in the U.S., Peoples Republic of China, Taiwan, Myanmar, … Read more
The QView #92 (February 9, 2021) A friend of mine, Corky Lee, a Queens College alumnus, passed away last month from COVID-19. A “Queens kid,” Corky was famous as a photographer who used images to advance activism. He noticed how Asian Americans were almost always left out of the picture, literally. As a child of … Read more
“Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness,which unites your body to your thoughts.”1 —Thich Nhat Hanh TODAY AS I WRITE during the fraught U.S. presidential election, the novel coronavirus has infected over forty-eight million people worldwide and counting. Covid-19 has captured our lives and extinguished the breath of over one-million people in over … Read more
OUR LIVES IN 2020 are being shaped by unfamiliar words, customs and concepts. Many of us are experiencing health insecurity, food insecurity, job insecurity, and fear of random violence. These concepts may be new to many of us, but they would have been very familiar to my grandfather Misao and many other immigrants and refugees, … Read more
“THE CURIOUS THING ABOUT PANDEMICS,” I read in a back issue of The Guardian, “is that novelists don’t seem to know what to do with them.” Well, that is one of the curious things about pandemics. “But when they have written memorably about them,” the critic continues, “it tends to have been as allegories for … Read more
DURING THE WORST Asian American Heritage Month ever, May 2020, I wondered how I would start my tenure as President of Queens College. I had been named to the position just as the COVID-19 pandemic was underway, invisible and silent, distributed by “super spreaders” who had brought it from both Asia and Europe, albeit without … Read more