Teaching Asian American history provides a path to a more fair U.S. | Opinion

When I first arrived on Davidson’s campus as a visiting assistant professor of Asian American history, I was fresh out of graduate school and burned out from finishing my dissertation in time to start my new job. Like any new professor, I had a litany of anxieties, the most pressing of which was what my students would call me. Should I let my students call me “Anna,” my easily pronounceable “American” name? Or should I opt for the hard-earned, and even harder to pronounce title, “Professor Nguyen”?

My last name is not uncommon, around a third of all Vietnamese people share my last name. At my high school in Portland, Oregon, there were so many students with the last name “Nguyen” that we had an entire row of chairs dedicated to us at graduation. Likewise, when I went to Seattle for college, I found my people quickly, as Asian and Asian American students make up one fifth of the University of Washington’s student population. It was a big change when I got a job at a college in which Asians and Asian Americans made up about five percent of the student population.

As the very first person to teach an Asian American history course at Davidson college, the smaller number of Asian American students did not deter me from taking the job. It excited me. When I was on the job market interviewing for schools with large and small Asian American student bodies, my refrain about the necessity of Asian American history remained the same: Asian American history was a valuable part of any history department’s curriculum because it provided all students a unique lens to better understand U.S. History.

I was also excited to come to Davidson so that I could be a resource for the Asian American students on campus, most of whom came to age during the COVID-19 pandemic and had questions about the anti-Asian racism they experienced or witnessed but could not fully contextualize.

During the early stages of the pandemic, President Donald Trump’s tweets pejoratively referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and the “Kung flu.” Trump’s tweets have been linked to a sudden rise in anti-Asian sentiments on Twitter and a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

Trump’s racist remarks against Asians confounded many of my Asian Americans students because they had to contend with being seen as the “model minority,” while the president was evoking the trope of the “yellow peril.” One of the goals in my Asian American history class was to provide students with examples of how Asian Americans have subverted the labels of the “model minority” and the “yellow peril” to define for themselves what it meant to be an Asian American. My hope is that in teaching my students about the past, they will be able to contextualize the present in order to imagine and pursue a better, more equitable future for all.

I am proud to be the first person to teach Asian American History at Davidson, and I hope that I will not be the last. For years now, faculty of the history department and the East Asian Studies department have argued that there is a need for a permanent Asian American historian on campus, as various scholars of East Asia have had to step up to mentor students who have wanted to conduct research on Asian American history. The Davidson administration, however, does not consider Asian American history to be a necessary part of its curriculum. Even now, as Davidson reaffirms its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the wake of recent executive orders released by the second Trump administration, it still does not see Asian American history in particular, and Asian American studies in general, as central to its commitment to serving a diverse student body.

I will be moving on from Davidson next year, but I take pride in the fact that I have affirmed to my Asian American students that their history does matter — even if they will need to go elsewhere to deepen their concentration in Asian American history. As one of my students wrote to me before transferring from Davidson to further her study of Asian American history at Northwestern, “Dear Professor Nguyen,” her letter began, ”As I continue to pursue history, I will carry with me the lessons and insights that you have taught me, and I know that they will continue to shape my future endeavors.”