By Kai Curry
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

It’s a pressing concern: How does an individual, a family, and an entire community heal from the impact of a hate crime?

It’s a question that multiple Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) organizations have been tackling not just since the pandemic, but even more since the pandemic, a question that AAPI Equity Alliance’s HOPE Program hopes to answer. Ethnic Media Services hosted an online program for journalists on May 31, the last day of Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month.

HOPE stands for “Healing Our People through Engagement” and it operates “through culturally centered community-based groups made up of representatives of the Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese populations.”

The briefing invited the moderators of these sessions, all AAPIs themselves, not necessarily formally trained in counseling or psychology, but united in compassion and empathy, to speak on the experience of the first run of group sessions in this state funded program. 

“They have experience from hate,” said Ethnic Media Services (EMS) co-director Julian Do. “The whole program is adopted from Black liberation, psychologists, a radical healing framework, which helps people of color deal with generations of racial trauma and develop a shared understanding and collective response to ongoing racism.” The hope for HOPE is that it will eventually be rolled out across the country.

Michelle Wong, the managing director of programs at the AAPI Equity Alliance, started off with HOPE’s raison d’être. 

“At the height of the pandemic…the Asian American community endured episodes of brutality on a scale not seen for generations in this country. They were scapegoated by politicians for transmission of COVID-19, targeted for violent physical attacks, made to feel unsafe, unwelcome in their own communities, and bullied and ridiculed by neighbors and strangers alike.” A co-founder of Stop AAPI, Wong and her colleagues knew the devastating toll this was taking on their communities. The wounds were physical, emotional, and mental.

They decided to use the Radical Healing framework previously developed. According to the writers of “The Psychology of Radical Healing Collective,” “radical healing involves being or becoming whole in the face of identity-based ‘wounds,’ which are the injuries sustained because of our membership in an oppressed racial or ethnic group.” As panelists said more than once, healing is hard by oneself. Therefore, HOPE “moves beyond individual level approaches to coping with racial trauma and instead uses the strength of communities to harness their collective experience of both pain and joy,” said Wong. 

Amongst a population that customarily keeps to itself, as AAPIs have often been described, talking to others about one’s pain is hard. HOPE is not a replacement for therapy—a very stigmatized activity within the AAPI population—yet it is a place to start to heal. It’s something one doesn’t understand until it happens—that opening up and realizing others have similar feelings can be life altering. 

“This innovative pilot is grounded in a healing and hope framework that encourages ethnic pride and community empowerment, and reinforces that racism doesn’t just occur on an individual level—it happens to communities,” said Wong.

The pilot program took place in the five largest Asian American communities in Los Angeles County: Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Cambodian communities. It has been funded by the California Department of Social Services and partnership organizations including the Little Tokyo Service Center, SSG-Asian Pacific Counseling and Treatment Centers, KoreaTown Youth + Community Center, Search to Involve Pilipino Americans, and Pacific Asian Counseling Services. Feedback so far has been positive.

“These spaces are not easy, but they are necessary to promote healing,” said Dr. Anne Saw, associate professor of psychology and affiliated faculty with the Global Asian Studies program at DePaul University in Chicago. “They can help address the feelings of loneliness and invisibility that many Asian Americans feel because of racism by helping people see how their experiences of racism are connected…and also by encouraging our participants to brainstorm about how communities can come together to do something about racism.” With HOPE, said Saw, “participants can begin to feel less alone and more empowered.”

“At the onset of this project, there were some doubts that were floated about whether or not this program was needed in the Japanese and Japanese American community,” said Xueyou Wang, Social Services Program Assistant at Little Tokyo Service Center and HOPE facilitator. “However, once we actually launched the program, we gathered our participants, and we started to talk to them, we could see that this program was actually very much needed in the community.” 

Yu Wang, HOPE facilitator and associate marriage and family therapist, shared similarly about the experience of running the program for the Chinese and Chinese American population. “Given the significant trauma and discrimination our community faced during the pandemic, from being yelled at on the street or being unsafe leaving their home after seeing news of Asian hate…a space for healing is critically needed. It is also difficult because our culture traditionally doesn’t emphasize sharing feelings and vulnerabilities.”

Yu, who added that the language barrier can also “exacerbate feelings of isolation and fear,” illustrated how her group of four became more and more engaged. One participant, she said, “felt unsafe and excluded,” not just around non-Asians but also around other Asians. This person “initially expressed distrust and hopelessness when talking about our unity. He said, ‘I don’t feel I’m Chinese and I don’t believe in Asians or Chinese [people].’ However, after seeing how others shared their stories openly, he felt encouraged and shared his own story.” Ultimately, Yu said this participant felt “accepted and hopeful. He said it was the first time he felt truly accepted by a group and he wanted to explore his Chinese identity and culture further.”

The curriculum takes place across six weeks in two-hour sessions. 

“The whole program is just great because not only am I able to understand racism through my own experiences,” said Joann Won, a HOPE facilitator from KoreaTown Youth + Community Center, “but by having these meetings with these five [Asian Americans] from diverse backgrounds and unique experiences, we’re able to feel a sense of connectedness by sharing our stories.” The space is non-judgmental, and according to Won, allows participants to “feel the full range of emotions involving racism.” This is crucial for AAPI communities that tend to dismiss microaggressions and their own feelings as “small things,” added Xueyou. 

“The small things build up and become bigger things…mental health becomes [poorer] over time because you don’t address the small things. That showed us that this program was very much needed in this community.” 

“It emphasizes healing rather than simply coping,” said Saw. “With the traumatic impacts of racism on communities of color, radical healing is about becoming whole in the face of ongoing racism. Through connecting with others in our communities, drawing strength from our community, our culture, our families, engaging in individual and community actions, that promotes our collective as well as our individual well-being.”

Kai can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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