Asian Americans – let alone Vietnamese Americans – don’t choose academia. The return on investment is arguably “not worth it.” There’s a lot of mental work that goes into just claiming that space, and in the midst of what is happening in our world, I want to open up about what some of that work looks like.
It’s not a secret that the field of French Studies is pretty homogenous – in social class and race. When I first started teaching French at Cornell, my goal was to be able to teach more advanced courses on literature because that likely meant your French was “good enough.” There was a divide between “teaching language” and “teaching literature,” as there tends to be at research institutions, as if one were more skillful or prestigious than the other. Unfortunately, as a graduate student, I was never given the opportunity to teach the “literature” courses in French. This among many things made me feel extremely self-conscious about my language capabilities.
In retrospect, I feel like I overlooked the connections I was able to form with my students, especially at those beginning level courses, because of this goal. It wasn’t until I started teaching at a liberal arts college that I began to see things in a new light. At a college, faculty teach all levels of French from beginning levels to advanced literature seminars. My first semester, I found myself, yet again, with a beginning level course. A colleague apologized to me about it. I tried to appear unbothered and said in reply, sort of as a defense mechanism, that these classes actually had a lot of impact. Saying this out loud struck a chord in my head: it was important that I taught these courses. Seeing someone different than the expected French professor (let’s just say it – a white professor) revised what students imagined to be possible with the French language. Hearing that I learned my French predominantly in college makes my students – especially students of color - feel inspired to keep doing the work. The students who were in my beginning level courses wanted to take more classes with me, which made me feel great about teaching.
Now, let’s stop for a moment - all of that, there? That’s me rewriting the narrative. That’s me justifying my presence in the academy. I think I do a good job of reframing my work and circumstances to remind me of the importance of my work, but if there’s anyone who’s reading who doesn’t have this experience, I can assure you that this constant work is hard and trying, and takes a lot of practice.
But indeed, being a woman of color means underrepresented students look to you for models of success. It means carving out a space for you, but also for them. It’s a job that can be extremely rewarding but also taken for granted.
We tend to say that if the department wants to diversify its student body, it needs to begin with diversifying its faculty. But no one talks about how important it is to also retain that faculty. Hiring us is one thing, keeping us around is another.
As a Vietnamese-American professor (or, insert any profession), you function within a double bind. There is the work of maintaining our status, a position that was hard to arrive at in the first place. As a result, there is little time to cultivate other parts of my identity. And yet, interacting with my students or colleagues, I feel it is my Asian identity that precedes the work I have done to be recognized as “professor”. Whether that is teaching with compassion or being the “nice” colleague, I feel like the work that I put in to maintain that professor identity does not get half as much attention as being visibly Asian, and along with that, the supposed assumptions of that identity. Indeed, America is not a color-blind country. But more than this is the reality that amidst the recurring incidents of Anti-Asian violence, there has been little discussion to address or stand with the AAPI community.
How is it that our identities are ignored or recognized, merely by the convenience of the conversation or circumstance?
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