History and Healing: A Celebration of AAPI Heritage Month

Co-presented with Heyday Books

Join Litquake and Heyday Books at the San Francisco Public Library as we kick off Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a very special conversation that celebrates AAPI history while also offering hope and healing for our current moment.

Authors Karen Fang and Satsuki Ina have brought to life remarkable true stories from twentieth-century Asian American history. In her memoir The Poet and the Silk Girl, Ina pieces together secret letters, diary entries, photographs, and haiku to craft the love story of her parents, who were newlyweds when incarcerated at Tule Lake and other Pr*son camps during WWII. In Background Artist, Fang reclaims the overlooked story of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese immigrant who became an accomplished muralist, Hallmark card designer, and artist for Warner Brothers and Disney studios—despite frequent hostilities and restrictions and without receiving proper credit.

The echoes of historical injustices still reverberate today, so this conversation will also give contemporary Asian Americans and their allies powerful tools to encourage recovery, resilience, and hope for the future. In Louder than the Lies, artist and educator Ellie Yang Camp offers context, compassion, and concrete tactics for building understanding and creating coalitions to combat continued racism. And in The Healing Trauma Workbook for Asian Americans, clinical psychologist Helen H. Hsu presents culturally informed treatment methods to contend with trauma, build resilience, and forge strength in Asian American identities. Moderator Dora Wang, a psychiatrist and memoirist (author of The Kitchen Shrink) will guide this empowering and illuminating discussion. FREE

Book sales coordinated by Eastwind Books.

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Ellie Yang Camp is an artist and educator from the Bay Area. The proud daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she has been a high-school history teacher, a full-time parent, a calligrapher, an anti-racist educator, and now an author. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in education from Stanford.

Karen Fang is a film scholar and visual culture critic who writes and speaks for museums and film festivals around the world. Known for previous books about Hong Kong cinema and nineteenth-century British interest in exotic objects, Fang often writes about the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Hyperallergic, Nikkei Asia, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also a prominent contributor to The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a long-running, widely distributed public radio series about science and innovation, where her episodes always focus on the visual arts. Committed to amplifying the contributions of underrepresented creatives, her newest book is a biography of Chinese immigrant artist, centenarian, and Disney legend Tyrus Wong.

Helen H. Hsu is a clinical psychologist and the director of outreach at Stanford University Counseling and Psychological Services. Hsu spent twenty years in community-based clinics throughout the Bay Area. Her Healing Trauma Workbook for Asian Americans is published by New Harbinger. She is the past president of the American Psychological Association Div. 45 (Society for the Study of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity) and a past president and fellow of the Asian American Psychological Association.

Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist specializing in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim not only their voice but also their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism has included co-founding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now! and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the Bay Area.

Dora Calott Wang (moderator) is the author of The Kitchen Shrink: A Psychiatrist’s Reflections on Healing in a Changing World (Riverhead Penguin Random House), a heartfelt literary memoir, and eulogy to her noble profession of medicine, as it becomes a for-profit industry. Wang has won a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency, the Pfeiffer Visiting Scholar Award from Stanford University, and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She earned a MA in English literature at UC Berkeley, and is a notable alumnus of the Community of Writers. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine, and a member of the Executive Committee of Yale Alumni in Medicine. Wang was elected to two terms as president of the American Psychiatric Association Caucus of Asian American Psychiatrists. In 2006, she led a political campaign that changed the New Mexico state constitution, removing a section aimed at forbidding Asians and persons of color from owning land.

Host or Publisher Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival