Webinar Videos: In the Pandemic's Wake

In the Pandemic's Wake Webinar Series Recap

Andrea Kim Neighbors:

The COVID-19 pandemic magnified social, economic, and environmental issues that were once out of focus. Among the communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities faced severe challenges that continue to leave a lasting impact today. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Asian Pacific American Center teamed up for a three-part series to reckon with and reflect on these challenges and highlight the intricate relationships between humans in nature and with each other to enact community wellbeing, environmental justice, and social change.

To open the series, Dr. Theo Gonsalves from the National Museum of American History showed an image of a banner created by San Francisco's Chinese American community in early 2020 that said, "Fight the virus, not the people."

Nayan Shah:

I think that the people in San Francisco who rallied together, created that banner, were really thinking about both more recent events, but also events that went back 150 years in that very site. So they were thinking about the kinds of fears that were generated about Chinatown businesses and people, and how the idea of people of Chinese race or Asian races were the source of disease. And they felt it more recently with SARS, with swine flu. There were these ideas that percolated, that lodged vitriol and violence against Asian people because they were perceived to be the source of disease. And I think living with that history, both a deep history and a more current one, made them feel like they needed to actually put out a defense for what they perceived might be emerging, or had already begun to happen in February of 2020.

Theo Gonzalves:

Yeah. So it was not as if they were predicting the future. They, of course, didn't have the ability to predict the future. They were being informed by these deep historical lessons from their own histories as Chinese ...

Andrea Kim Neighbors:

We heard from artists Monica Jahan Bose and Hina Kneubuhl, who talked about how the pandemic affected their practices as socially engaged artists.

Hina Kneubuhl:

Because it's a living medium, and that's a relationship with an aumakua, essentially, right? Maikoha is the deified ancestor whose body was buried, and the wauke plant grew from the grave of Maikoha. That's one story about where welki comes from. That's a living relationship that I couldn't have anymore, but what I could do was write a pule that kind of provided me spiritual connection because I couldn't be physically there. And for me, as a Hawaiian, it's really important to be in direct relationship with that thing. So being cut off from it was really hard. I knew that my plants were suffering, there was drought during the pandemic here in Maui. I came back, my patch was in terrible shape, eventually when I did come back. And so not being able to be in relationship with that aumakua was hard, but I kind of went around that and just thought, here's all this beautiful material I have. I can really honor this, what I have here with me right now.

And so I wrote a pule for beating, before starting to beat, and it kind of has a rhythm so it could take you right into beating. And so I wrote the words and I collaborated with my friend Pulama Collier, lovely wahine, who lives here on Maui and she put leo to it. And so I texted her the words and she texted me a recording, and there was this beautiful collaboration. And then I had this leo, this thing that I could do to acknowledge these aumakua, talks about Maikoha, Lauhuiki, La'ahana, who are three of the main aumakua associated with Kapa making. So it was little things like that making a pule for my practice that helped me kind of sustain that spiritual connection because I couldn't have the direct physical relationship.

Andrea Kim Neighbors:

And finally, we met community leaders and scholars who reflected on how the pandemic affected them and their community building efforts.

Jacqueline Thanh:

In the pandemic's wake, I feel like the parts of our community that were allowed to be siloed, that felt like it was safer to be siloed, did not feel that way. And so bringing my full self to me means being unapologetic about the inner ethnic tensions that I hold in my body. In both Chinese and both Vietnamese, there's both settler colonialism in me and there's both indigenous in me. And how do I contend with this? Even in my own body showing up as a full-bodied Asian-American femme-presenting person.

Andrea Kim Neighbors:

We invite you to watch the conversations and reflect on how we can become more prepared and inform citizens of the world no matter what comes our way. In the Pandemic's Wake was presented by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and Asian Pacific American Center, with federal support from the Asian-Pacific American Initiatives Pool administered by the Smithsonian Asian-Pacific American Center.