Through surveys and interviews,
Asians at Hamilton
is a Levitt Center project that examines the history and current experiences of Asians and Asian Americans at Hamilton College. The original project (now titled “Phase I”) was conducted by students Nyaari Kothiya ’23, Jason Le ’23 and Anna Sakamoto ’23 during Winter 2021. The students watched 30+ fiction and non-fiction films about the Asian and Asian American experience in society. Afterwards, they wrote a 95 page paper that analyzed the shared themes of the American Dream, family, the model minority myth, stigma, feeling out of place and transition.
The close links between their analytical findings and their own experiences inspired the trio to continue the project past Phase I. Associate Professor of Japanese Kyoko Omori suggested that the team expand their project. During Summer 2021, 11 students were divided into three teams (History, Statistics and Narratives), and Associate Professor of Literature Pavitra Sundar, Edmund A. LeFevre Professor of English Steven Yao and Professor Omori served as faculty advisors.
During the first two weeks, the student researchers collectively read
Racial Formation in the United States
by Michael Omi and Howard Winant and watched the PBS series
Asian Americans
. Next, they discussed their own experiences through the lens of this new knowledge. Before starting research, each team member wrote a personal narrative essay and shared it with the group. This narrative showed the students that the political, personal, academic and historical aspects of the project were all interconnected. “The slogan ‘the personal is political’ was very much true for our project,” said Rachel Lu ’22, a member of the History Team (also known as “Team 1”).
The three teams primarily worked independently, but they met nearly every Sunday for discussion. “We had a lot of seamless interweaving between the three projects,” said Lu. “We had a huge shared Google Drive, so we could see anytime what Statistics (Team 2) or Narratives (Team 3) was doing.” She would regularly check on the other teams’ data to avoid unnecessary repetition or to create connections between her work and theirs.
Everyone started working remotely in Summer 2021, but Lu requested to come back to Hamilton halfway through to access the College Archives, as they were not available digitally nor remotely. The team combed through every record from the College’s history that mentioned Asians, but information about campus life was scarce. In fact, Lu mostly relied on
The Spectator
archives to find out what happened in the community at various times. According to Lu, recorded events are the ones that shape history, but “it is hard to record racism unless it’s a violent act.” Additionally, she said that verbal or “minor” incidents are hard to report, and even the word microaggression implies that the violation was no big deal and makes people hesitant to speak up.
Lu strongly identifies as Chinese American, but she worked through a lot of internalized racial conflict in high school. Growing up, she would try to “assimilate into the white neighborhood [she] came from and try to fit in,” going so far as to refuse to respond to her parents in Chinese when they spoke to her in that language. Now, she is pursuing a double concentration in Chinese and Literature. Learning more about her culture and the history of Chinese Americans has helped her become comfortable in, and proud of, her identity. “What the project did help me do was understand how important it is to speak out, and that was a big takeaway for me” said Lu.
Lu also discovered that Hamilton was more politically active in the past, especially during the Vietnam War. This discovery made her realize that a small group of students have the potential to mobilize the entire Hamilton community. During her senior year, Lu hopes to “have Asians and Asian Americans speak out more and mobilize together, and for ASU to put on more political events, to make Asian American issues more well-known on this campus.”
To quantify and assess Asian and Asian American experiences at Hamilton in the present day, Statistics used the data from a small 2014 focus group on Asian students’ satisfaction as a springboard to create their own survey. The 22 question survey (using respective 7-point Likert scales) was sent to students, alumni, faculty and staff in Aug 2021. It received 130 responses. One striking finding was that most students felt that Hamilton was not providing enough support and resources tailored towards Asians and Asian Americans. Although the peak was the neutral option (as most normal distributions are), responses strongly skewed to the “disagree” side, showing that most respondents wish for more support.
Statistics found their biggest limitation to be that the roster of names they could acquire was incomplete, which meant that some voices were inadvertently omitted. Narratives also experienced this issue when they interviewed current students, alumni, and Hamilton employees about their experiences. With no information on ethnicity in the alumni database, Sakamoto did the best she could: she “looked through the alumni directory, and literally just picked out Asian last names.” However, Team 3 was ultimately able to interview 28 alumni, 30 students and 13 employees. Narratives planned specific sets of questions for each group, and conducted 10–20 minute interviews. Afterwards, Sakamoto would replay the recordings and transcribe them word-for-word, enabling her to catch every detail. Inputting summaries of each interview into a Google Form helped the team find the similarities and trends in responses.
What surprised Sakamoto the most was that a lot of people had identity crises during their time at Hamilton, including herself. She explained, “Figuring out what you want to do with your life, figuring out what you want to study, can be really challenging when you’re also trying to figure out who you are based on your ethnicity, race and culture.”
Whether racially or socioeconomically, “Hamilton is still a very segregated school,” she said, explaining that many interviewees ranging from 90s alums to current students had majority POC friend groups during their time here. Sakamoto said that there are certain experiences as a minority that are difficult to explain, and it forms “an invisible wall between you,” so that is something one wants to address as a student researcher.
The entire project can be found online at hamiltoncs.org/asians-hamilton/. The website includes a timeline of Asian American history at Hamilton, survey results, and perspectives from current students, alumni and employees.
