Storyteller Frances Osugi with Brilliant Boba's Emily Chew. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Dr. Christina Cho wanted to break through the model minority myth, and started telling her own story as a way to do it. Frances Osugi began with an anecdote about okra, and ended with a reflection on multicultural identity. Kaitlin Tan Fung mapped the matriarchs in her family, drawing a line from Shanghai to Chicago.
All of them are part of "Brilliant Boba: Amplifying Asian Voices," a new teaching resource from the Yale-China Association that uses storytelling, multimedia art and design, and interactive narrative prompts to teach Asian American history from the nineteenth century through the present. Over a multi-part curriculum, it presents that history in a living, vibrant context that feels long overdue. Until this month, many of the contributors had only ever seen each other on a screen.
On a recent Friday, the initiative launched with an intimate celebration at the Whitneyville Cultural Commons, complete with Loose Leaf Boba tea and food from New Haven’s Great Wall restaurant. The timing coincides with both Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, which runs May 1 through May 31, and new legislation that will require AAPI history to be taught in Connecticut schools by the fall of 2025.
It is supported by Yale-China, the International Association of New Haven, CT Humanities, and the Yale Community for New Haven Fund.
Brilliant Boba's supporters at the launch. Many of the storytellers and participating artists and educators had not met each other in person before this month.
“It feels so good to be here,” said Emily Chew, senior program officer for education and the arts at Yale China. “It feels like such a long journey, but really it’s just starting. ”
The project has grown from a grassroots idea into a robust initiative with over two dozen artists. Brilliant Boba was born in March 2020, in direct response to a spike in anti-Asian hate across the country. Just weeks into the pandemic, Chew found herself watching anti-Asian violence rise across the U.S., threatening people’s lives and livelihoods in the process. In Washington, the former occupant of the White House fueled anti-Asian and AAPI hate speech one Twitter tantrum at a time.
At the same time, Yale-China had to suspend its teaching fellowship program, which puts teachers from China in New Haven Public Schools classrooms. In New Haven, public partner schools reached out to Chew and Director of Arts Programs Annie Lin, asking what they could do in the fellows’ absence. The more resources she looked for, the more pressing it seemed to build a curriculum that centered Asian voices—and allowed them to personalize the story of their own history.
For Chew, the arts were always the container that made the most sense. Brilliant Boba looped in artists from across New Haven and the state, from dancer Keith Leonhardt to the spoken word alchemist Zulynette to theatermaker Jisun Kim. She worked with educators including New Haven Academy teacher Marco Cenebre, Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School’s (Co-Op) Lindsay Bauer, Julia Wang and Kathy Lu of the Immigrant History Initiative and Erin McElhone, a fourth grade teacher at John C. Daniels School.
As the program evolved, she also found storytellers in fellow members of the Asian Network @ Yale (ANY), from bibliophiles to immunobiologists. Last Friday, a few of them bounced from table to table, catching up after months spent largely on a screen.
Dr. Christina Cho.
Cho, an immunobiologist who does cancer research at the Yale School of Medicine, joined as a way to bust through the model minority myth. Born and raised in a suburb of Los Angeles, she grew up as the child of two immigrants from South Korea, both blue collar workers who did not have college degrees. When the two divorced during her teenage years, she became financially responsible for her education.
“The idea that Asian American students, things just work out for them, it’s not true,” she said. After high school, Cho went on to pursue an undergraduate degree in microbiology at UCLA. Because money was tight, she worked full time, and her academic performance suffered.
“I knew I wanted to do more,” she said—but her grades weren’t strong enough alone for admission into graduate school. She was working at a coffee shop when a professor asked her if she might want to work in research for a year. She’d never even thought about it.
The colleague he had in mind was Dr. Sherilyn Gordon-Burroughs, a pioneering transplant surgeon in the field who was one of the first Black women to hold the title. When Cho sent over her CV, Gordon-Burroughs “gave me this chance,” Cho said. She understood that Cho hadn’t let her grades slip because she was lackadaisical, but because she had been overwhelmed while balancing full-time work and full-time school.
“She changed my life,” Cho said. “She saw my passion. She saw my potential.”
Gordon-Burroughs brought Cho onto a lab at the Dumont UCLA Liver Transplant Center. After a year there, Cho headed to graduate school at Albany Medical College, and then on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She started at the Yale School of Medicine in September 2020. When she arrived at Yale, she joined ANY as a way to find community. That’s how she and Chew connected over a year ago.
“I want to tell my story so students know that it’s okay to mess up,” she said. “You don’t know who your mentors are going to be. When you get that chance, you gotta pay it forward.”
She is now working on a podcast series called STEAM-D, in which she interviews scientists and artists about their own career paths, and skills including how to do interviews, write cover letters, and get one’s foot in the door.
Food at the launch included Loose Leaf Boba tea and dishes from Great Restaurant on Whitney Avenue.
It is one of many stories on the site. A conservation technician at Yale, Osugi came to Brilliant Boba through a book club hosted by the Asian Network @ Yale. Originally from Nebraska, she moved to New Haven by way of Philadelphia in 2016, and joined ANY as a way to meet people. In April of last year, she and Chew were prepping for a book club meeting on Vice President Kamala Harris’ The Truths We Hold when she went off on a tangent about okra.
Growing up, her grandmother had used the slippery green vegetable in gumbo, alongside sticky rice and wontons. Her mother boiled it alongside yams and soybeans as part of neba neba, a Japanese word for slimy, sticky vegetables that aid digestion.
The vegetable, which also features in Harris’ biography, made Osugi think about the number of dishes her family improvised when they couldn’t find the right ingredients in the Nebraska. She grew up with one set of Southern grandparents, even though her family lived in the Midwest. She later experienced a sense of “major culture shock” when she moved to New Haven.
“We just used whatever was available or affordable,” she read in her story, a short audio recording on the Brilliant Boba site aptly titled “Okra.” In a steady voice, she described thinking that those substitutions—peanuts in the shell, gumbo with sticky rice, okra made multiple different ways—were completely normal as a child. It was only when she got older that she realized that her family was making do with what they had.
“I think in the United States, growing up here, you feel bicultural or multicultural if you have one parent from one part of the states and a parent from another,” she said. “It’s a very big place.”
Chew convinced her to write her story down for the project. She described Brilliant Boba’s mission of teaching Asian history and culture to K-12 students. Osugi got on board with the idea.
“Food is a place where I feel whole,” Osugi said in the story. “Food is a place where I understand being Asian and American.”
Lindsay Bauer, who piloted the program with her dance students at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School.
Bauer, who piloted the program with her students before the launch, said she’s excited to see Brilliant Boba out in the world. When Chew was building the program, Bauer joined as an educational consultant, helping choose the artists featured in Brilliant Boba. In part, she said the point was to make it “user friendly for an educational classroom.” Part of that work was trying out the curriculum before it went live this month.
With her juniors at Co-Op, she watched a tap dancing and choreographed segment from artist Keith Leonhardt. The class talked about what students observed during the segment, the story that Leonhardt was working to tell through dance, and the creative work each of them hoped to do as they began thinking about their own senior capstone projects.
Bauer said her only regret was not being able to use more of the curriculum with that class. When she was first testing it out, her students recognized ant-Asian stereotypes and assumptions, addressing their own biases in the process.
“It was really nice to identify those, and also break them down,” she said. “Have you ever felt that way?
She’ll be using it again this summer, as she leads a free summer camp at home for her two young sons. Bauer said she’s especially excited that so many of the artists on the project hail from Connecticut, adding a deeply local lens.
"I’m excited to use it continually and offer it to every other educator that I run in with,” she said. “I think that it’s imperative. It’s not only that you’re reading about and learning about [them] in school. You could go see their work. You could go meet them. And that visibility and that representation is so important.”
Check out Brilliant Boba here.