[This is an archival post to highlight past work that helped to build the Chloe Center.]
The 300 block of Park Avenue in Downtown Baltimore was at the center of several presentations by undergraduate students on Tuesday, December 6th. This block today is home to several businesses run by Ethiopian merchants, offering hair styling, meals, and other essentials. Yet this block historically has been the locus of the Chinese community in the city of Baltimore, which peaked in the 1960s.
Students examined this unique block and its changes, amid the broader vicissitudes of economic and racial transformations in Baltimore, as part of their fall course History Research Lab: Asian Diaspora in Baltimore, taught by assistant professor of history H. Yumi Kim.
In March 2021, as a response to the pain and outrage among Asian and Asian-American students and others after the shootings in Atlanta, Kim, along with RIC’s Clara Han and Erin Chung, founded Critical Responses to Anti-Asian Violence (CRAAV), which has supported programming on political and cultural questions of the Asian diaspora in the United States and elsewhere. This project also helped germinate an ongoing student-led initiative to create a new major within RIC called Critical Diasporic Studies that would emphasize AAPI experiences and politics, as well as investigate global indigeneities, comparative colonialisms, and other large social questions that have been the core of the work RIC has been hosting among PhD students.
Kim’s History Research Lab course represents the meeting of CRAAV’s critical political inquiries and the student energy behind the push for new curricular offerings on the Homewood campus that better address the complex and intersecting identities of the increasingly diverse student body.
Urgent Questions
The nine students in Kim’s course faced a basic challenge: although we do know that Asian people have lived in Baltimore for over a hundred years, almost no scholarly literature documents their history. And, moreover, as the contemporary streetscape of the 300 block of Park Avenue demonstrates, this history is in danger of disappearing. The possibility of losing this history made the students’ research feel urgent.
To a crowd of around thirty other students (graduate and undergraduate), faculty, librarians and archivists, and community members, the students presented their early research findings on topics including relations between Korean and Black populations in Baltimore (Vanessa Han), local Cantonese- and Toisanese-language schools (Dylan Tran), the Baltimore Chinese merchants’ association On Leong Tong (Kobi Khong), and others. Cal Lee and Ishika Kaushik presented a draft version of a public website that will help document the Asian Diaspora in Baltimore, including the research of the students in the class.
The event was co-sponsored by CRAAV, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, the Department of History, and RIC. Maria Paz G. Esguerra, assistant professor of history at Bridgewater College, provided comments on the presentations.
Community-based Learning
Throughout the fall semester, Kim’s class hosted local community leaders. Students reported that speaking with these figures, including longtime Baltimore residents Rockwood Lee, Vincent Liu, and George Yung, changed the way they understood the history of Asian people in Baltimore. Their accounts of growing up and living in the city did not always conform to what the students found in the secondary literature about other locations in the United States. Students further pointed out that some of the conceptual vocabularies that scholars tend to use did not seem adequate to the granular details of these individuals’ biographies, which, one student said, “brings the content of the course to life and makes students feel so much more connected to and passionate about the issues we’re learning about.”