ICS Lecture: Ziying You, "Surviving 'Twin Pandemics': Diverse Resiliences of Global Asian Immigrant Mothers in the US"

The Institute for Chinese Studies presents:

"Surviving 'Twin Pandemics':  Diverse Resiliences of Global Asian Immigrant Mothers in the US"

Ziying You
College of Wooster

Abstract: Based on virtual ethnography, interviews, and personal experience narratives collected in 2020-2023, this study examines the stories, experiences, struggles, and resiliences of global Asian immigrant mothers in the US during the “twin pandemics” of Covid-19 and racisms. I explore how these mothers have moved forward by recognizing the breadth and depth of the pandemics’ destruction, developing various coping strategies, creating diverse individual and collective forms of resiliences, and advocating for social justice. By examining critical perspectives on the concepts of resiliences in diverse fields, including folklore studies, ecology, psychology, ethnomusicology, and public health, I integrate individual, cultural, and political resilience frameworks to illustrate how diverse forms of resiliences have been cultivated and played roles in constituting global Asian immigrant mothers’ national, racial, ethnic, and gendered subjectivities and agencies. This study also helps us rethink how we could carry on and live meaningful lives in the face of trauma, loss, hatred, tragedy, and absurdity. Download the PDF flyer here.

Ziying You is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Chinese Studies at the College of Wooster, Executive Board Member (2024-2026) of American Folklore Society, and the Senior Convener of Transnational Asia/Pacific Section of American Folklore Society. Her research interests include Chinese literature, folklore studies, critical heritage studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality Studies, anti-Asian racisms, and public health. She is the author of Folk Literati, Contested Tradition, and Heritage in Contemporary China: Incense Is Kept Burning (Indiana University Press, 2020). She is co-editor of Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice (2019) and of a special issue for the journal Asian Ethnology, titled Intangible Cultural Heritage in Asia: Traditions in Transition (2020). Her new book manuscript is titled Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic on Chinese and Chinese American Women in the US: Anti-Asian Racisms, Feminisms, and Fluid Foodways.