How Do Normal People Do It?

Yikes, has it really been four months since I've updated this blog? Blah blah, I've been busy, blah blah, being a professor is hard, blah blah... Everyone seems to belong to the Cult of Busy, so I don't think my life is any more special or important than anyone else's. But still, these last few months have got me asking, "How do people do it?"

And by "do it," I mean lead a normal and fulfilling life.

I think I've had a pretty productive first year on my tenure track. I've taught successful classes, did some department and university service, took on a few student advisees, revised and resubmitted an article, wrote a draft of another, applied to a few conferences, wrote papers for those conferences (the first new work since finishing my dissertation), got elected to the executive board of one of my academic associations, and participated in all those obligatory odds and ends meetings and things that are constantly happening on campus. My chair and primary evaluator gave me a positive evaluation, and my contract is still in tact.

And yet, though I should be entirely satisfied with how I've transitioned into this job, I can't help but hear the incessant ticking of the tenure clock. I really wish I could have done more: submitted the second article, got started on my book proposal, just did more plain ol' reading. I look at some of my colleagues around me and wonder how on earth they can be so damn prolific. For me, squeezing out a paper really does feel like pooping a watermelon most of the time.

There is the stereotype of the nutty professor whose entire life is his/her work. There could be some truth to that, especially for women. Several women whom I admire churn out book after book, article after article. They get invited to give guest lectures at universities halfway across the world. People travel halfway across the world to see them at conferences. They actually receive grants for the research they do. But these women are also single, have had to uproot themselves every few years, whenever another institution offers them a more lucrative position, and will never have children. At least from an outsider's perspective, these rock stars are only so because their work is their life.

I've gotten a lot of career advice over the years, but no one has ever been able to tell exactly what it takes to "make it" in this profession. Am I supposed to be putting every ounce of energy into this work? How many hours a day should I be devoting to my writing? How many books should I be reading in a week? Can I afford to do anything else?

I don't even want to be an academic rock star. I would be perfectly content working for the rest of my life at a lesser-known institution with tenure requirements that encourage faculty to strike a healthy balance between teaching, research, and service while also allowing them to have lives outside of the university. And by the looks of it, my current institution should be such a place, but I feel as though I'm already struggling to keep afloat. And I know for a fact that it's only going to get harder next year and the next, as I get asked to take on more responsibilities like sit on committees and start up programs on campus. I'm really starting to understand when people say that a professor's job never stops.

But I need it to stop once in a while. I need to be able to put work aside and go to my Taekwondo classes, choir rehearsals, volunteer activities. I need to be able to sit down at my electric piano and just bang out some Beethoven for an hour. I need to attend the parties that my friends throw. I need to help my friends when they need a favor. I need to visit my family. I need to host friends when they come to visit. I need to maintain my home so that it's not disgusting. I need to go on dates! (Dating, I've always thought, is practically a parttime job in and of itself, which is probably why I've never been very good at it.) I need to allow myself rest when I get sick (as I did for the whole friggin' month of March). I need to imagine that should I one day in the not so distant future get married and start a family, that I could do so without feeling as though I'm throwing away the career I worked so hard to attain.

Can I do it all? I know several female academics who have families and hobbies in addition to prosperous careers. And they seem like well adjusted individuals, and as far as I know they don't have secret coke habits. But maybe they're also out-of-this-world brilliant and are able to come up with ideas and produce them at a fraction of time it takes for me to do the same. Is that what it takes? Is that how they do it?

So yeah, long story short: I've been busy. It's been a good busy, but overwhelming nonetheless.

Blah.

When Nerds Attempt to Hook Up

I know several people who met their significant others at a work-related conference. I suppose this makes sense, given that the conditions are ideal for a hook-up. You're at a hotel already. You get to meet people with similar interests as you do, and everyone is dressed up and looking nice. And after or in between all the conferencing stuff, every social and networking occasion involves alcohol. And you're there for only a few days, so you'd might as well have a little fun while you're working.

However, in regards to academic conferences, which are the only conferences I've been to, I find it hard to believe that much hooking up happens. Quite frankly, I rarely see anyone remotely fuckable at academic conferences. Professors are largely former speech and debate geeks and academic decathletes (no joke), so one can only imagine what kind of a meat market academic conferences might be.

At a recent conference I attended, I did manage to meet someone with hook-up potential. He wasn't a professor or a graduate student, but worked as a program coordinator at an institution that works in historical preservation. I'll just refer to him as Sriracha. Because I only remember that his name started with an S. And, well, because he was hot. Anyway, I met Sriracha with a group of graduate students who were having dinner and drinks at the end of the first day of the conference. As the night progressed, we got drunk, danced, flirted, and eventually found ourselves back at the hotel.

Now, I'm not one to do the one-night-stand thing, even in my drunkest and flirtiest state. So I was pretty careful about setting my boundaries and keeping things light. Sriracha, however, definitely wanted sex. A part of me was definitely tempted to throw caution to the wind and sleep with the guy. But then, the dude suddenly transformed into a pubescent boy. After going in for a kiss, he started talking like Screech from Saved By the Bell and exclaimed, "Woah, what happened there?" And then he told me he wanted to see my "boobies, " after which I burst out laughing and told him I had to call it a night. Any desire on my part to hook-up fizzled. I didn't see the guy again for the rest of the conference.

Anyway, because the academic world is absurdly small, it turns out that Sriracha knows a good friend of mine, who worked at the same institution he works for. She was quite shocked when I told her about our little almost-hook-up, because the dude is engaged to be married. And apparently, his fiancee is absolutely gorgeous. My friend is also very disappointed the fact that Sriracha would cheat on his fiancee, because he seems to be such a decent, intelligent, put-together guy.

I suppose I should be insulted by the fact that this guy was putting me in the position of Bombshell McGee, Divine Brown, or the however many women Tiger Woods managed to have affairs with. But mostly I just think the whole scenario is absurd. I'll bet Sriracha regularly has one night stands with women whenever he goes to conferences. Had he not chosen to make me his target, I'm sure he would have found someone else that night. He may have had a different woman each night he was at the conference. I think this might be the case for a lot of men in academia, especially in the humanities, where men are the distinct minority. Sriracha, who's attractive, but really is only a normal-looking dude in the normal world, must easily catch the attention of academic women, who either don't get to meet very many men at all or only meet friggin' weird and awkward men. (Again, academics really are just a bunch of nerds.) I've seen it time and again-- Guys who are really unexceptional-looking or even downright ugly getting way more ass than one would think they'd be able to get, or snagging women way out of their league and then cheating on them. I really don't get this behavior.

Jerks exist everywhere in and in all forms, of course. But put a guy in an environment where he feels entitled to be greedy, even the biggest nerd can be a playboy.

How to Become a Professor (When You Don't Know What You Are Doing)-- Lesson 3: Don't Give People a Reason to Talk Shit About You

This quarter, because I am now officially PhD-ed, I'm able to become hired as a lecturer at the university in which I have been attending for the last 7+ years as a graduate student. The class I'm teaching is on Asian Diasporas, and it's offered through the Asian American Studies department, which does not have a graduate program. It's a class of 60 students, which means that I get to hire a reader to help me grade assignments. I figured this was a nice opportunity for me to help out a fellow graduate student who may be struggling to find funding. It's absolutely imperative that graduate students here get at least a 25% appointment, because that's the amount needed to have your fees waived and receive health insurance coverage without having to pay extra for it. After checking to make sure that all of my friends had some form of employment for the spring, I asked the graduate counselor at my home department, English, to let me know if there are any graduate students who are still unemployed. She gave me a couple of names, and told me to come into her office to look at their files.

So I did, but it was really weird to be put in that position. Luckily, both of the candidates were M.A. students whom I had never met, so I wasn't being granted access to my friends' files. (I would have declined to look at them, if that were the case.) Still, it felt wrong to be able to read a grad student's statement of purpose, to glance at her letters of rec, to see what her GRE scores were. I became all too aware of the fact that anyone who has ever hired me has also looked through MY file, which I haven't seen.

I'm assuming I'm not allowed to see what's in my file, but I actually don't know because I've never asked. Aside from what I submitted when I applied to the program 8 years ago, I don't know what's actually IN my file. It wasn't until I had TAs that I realized that every instructor I ever worked for had to do a little write-up on my performance and stick it in my file. It wasn't until I wrote to the department chair mentioning that the two professors running our job placement workshop were doing an excellent job and got a reply from him saying that he was going to print out my email and put it in their files that I realized that even not-so-official documents can go into my file as well. So it kind of weirds me out to know that there is an 8-year-old file that contains all sorts of documents that I don't even know about.

I wonder if bad evaluations ever get put into someone's file. I'd like to think not, but I guess one could never know. I can think of a couple of professors I've worked for who would probably have no qualms about writing a graduate student a scathing review But even if an employer were more diplomatic and would never write up a negative evaluation, it's always easy to distinguish between generic evaluations and glowing ones. I imagine a file full of boring and half-hearted reviews would be just as damaging to one's career.

For my entire life, I've taken the philosophy of just getting my shit done and doing it with excellence, but I've never been interested in, or that good at, self-promotion. But now, the most important file I may ever have is my tenure file, which I have to start building. I'm going to have to be aggressive and strategic in making sure that things going into it present me as an indispensable employee. I wonder if I could get someone to write up a document that says, "AsianGirlProf is the awesomest person in the world and wears really cute shoes."

Asians Descend Upon Texas!

I spent the last few days in Austin, TX, for the annual conference of the Association for Asian American Studies. This was the first conference I attended after being officially PhD-ed and getting a job. This was was also the first conference in which I actually understood what the point of going to academic conferences is.

I typically hate going to conferences. I always have a hard time preparing the paper and figuring out how to represent my work within a 20-minute time slot. I'm not all that keen on watching other people give their papers, either. The format, which basically entails people reading off of a page, is excruciatingly boring. And I rarely get anything out of other people's papers that ends up helping my own work. Most of the conferences I went to as a graduate student ended up being expensive CV fillers.

Of course, the main purpose of going to a conference is to network and make connections with important people who work in your field of study. In previous conferences, I knew I was supposed to locate my academic role models and strike up conversation with them, but I was always a bit too intimidated to do so. At the first AAAS conference I went to, I attended a panel in which both Lisa Lowe and Michael Omi gave papers. As a lowly 2nd year graduate student with no reputation or publications to claim, I wasn't going to just butt into their conversation with nothing to say but, "I'm a big fan." So maybe this year's AAAS was a little different for me because I felt more equipped to enter as a colleague rather than an adoring student. I'm still an unknown, given that the publications I've sent through the pipeline have yet to be published. But at least I'm able to assert myself as someone who has made it into the profession.

First I should explain that I got my place in the conference through some networking I had done at the American Literature Association Conference two years ago. At the ALA, there's the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies. I attended their business meeting, which then put me in connection with some folks that I had long admired for their work. It was also from that CAALS meeting that I volunteered to chair a panel for the next ALA conference. It was one of the presenters from my panel who put together the panel proposal for the AAAS conference this year. Long story short: The community of scholars working in Asian American literature is very small. We find each other at the same conferences, read the same journals, and apply for the same jobs.

It is because the Asian Am lit community is so small that we also become heavily invested in each other's careers. So when the chair of my panel announced the fact of my getting a job on this particularly bad year while he was introducing me, the audience gave me a round of applause. The group of folks I had met through CAALS, and who were also presenting at AAAS this year, consists of professors who have either just gotten tenure or are about to. I think they've known each other for a while now, which explains why I never really socialized with them at previous conferences. This time, though, as a new member of the profession, I got invited to go out for lunch and dinner with them. It was from these gatherings that I learned about what their careers have been like. It was also from these gatherings that I may have been able to secure myself another publishing opportunity. That's something that I wish I had figured out earlier: Important developments in your career often happen when you're chitchatting over drinks.

As much as I took delight in being initiated into this "club," I don't like the social hierarchy that it clearly reflects. The social hierarchy of the academia seems to dictate that graduate students and professors reside in different castes, which is something that I never really recognized until my first conference as a soon-t0-be professor. I don't think the division between graduate students and professors is a conscious one. It's not as if these new colleagues of mine declared amongst themselves, "NOW she is worthy of socializing with us." But there is something about the atmosphere of academia that makes you very aware of where you sit on the totem pole. Only the most generous of higher-ups will make a point to lend a hand to lowly graduate students. And only the most aggressive of graduate students will successfully grab the attention of professors.

I think I'm currently in this in-between stage, where I still identify myself as a graduate student, and where most of my friends are still graduate students, but where I've also become aware of the additional capital and access I've recently attained. This became very obvious to me during the nights while I was in Austin-- After the conference events were over, a lot of the graduate students went out to 6th Street and partied it up. On a couple of the nights, I joined in on the drinking, dancing and flirting. I had a lot of fun, and made some new friends. But a part of me also felt that I didn't belong there, much in the way that I got over fraternity parties after my first year of college.

Not to say that professors don't get drunk and stupid sometimes. Maybe they just do it in separate circles. I guess I'll find out at next year's AAAS conference, which will take place in New Orleans!

On Teaching Race

Unless I get recruited to head-start a new Ethnic Studies program at the university for which I'll be working as a new assistant professor, this quarter may be my last teaching an Asian American Studies class. I am currently teaching two classes: one upper-division English course at a women's liberal arts college, and one upper-division Asian American Studies course at my home university. One is a seminar of 8 students, all women, mostly white, all English majors. The other is a class of 60 students, co-ed, vast majority of whom are API, and whose majors run the gamut of Asian American Studies, political science, and economics.

My English course at the women's college, being on the semester system, started in January. I was immediately struck by how refreshing and satisfying teaching English majors can be, especially since I had never had the opportunity to teach English majors at my home campus. The students are immediately engaged and invested, and are coming in at the same level of preparedness. On the first day, I brought in some pieces of poetry, and right away the students started explicating it together, breaking down the literary devices. The atmosphere is also striking when the class is all-female. Whenever I teach co-ed classes, even when there are only one or two men in the class (which has been the case in some of the writing classes I've taught), and even when these men aren't even close to being the smartest students in the class, they tend to dominate (and often derail) the class discussion. It's really nice not having to monitor that as a female instructor. It's also nice not having to justify why gender is a relevant topic of discussion when we're discussing literature, history, or whatever. I also tend to like smaller classes, because I like being able to give each student individual attention. So in many respects, this English class has been my ideal teaching experience.

But something happened these last couple of weeks that has made me appreciate my big Asian American Studies classes. My English class is on Vietnam War literature, which, given the war that it concerns, is always about race. But in these last couple of weeks, I've chosen to put race front and center as the topic for discussion. We talked about the musical Miss Saigon. We read Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. We talked about Kim Phuc, the young girl running from a napalm bombing, who became a humanitarian and figure of reconciliation. I talked about how Asian women are figured as a sort of romantic fantasy, through which the white male American soldier can at once exert his colonial power (in other words, Orientalism) but can also "save" her and assuage his guilt. I asked the students to think about where the Orientalist fantasy comes from and how it's continually perpetuated.

As students in a women's college, these students have been more than ready to discuss how war is premised on notions of masculinity, how women are excluded from the notions of citizenship that serving in war is supposed to grant, etc. But to get them to talk about race has been like pulling teeth. Only the two women of color-- one Asian, one Latina-- have been at all willing to engage with me. What the white women tend to say in response to any question I pose is, "But isn't that the case for all women?" So when I asked, "Why does Kim have to kill herself at the end of Miss Saigon?" one white student said, "Like in Victorian literature, the woman always gets punished in the end." Well, yes. The self-annihilating woman is a common trope in many cultural traditions. But does the fact of her being Asian, especially given all the various incarnations of the Madame Butterfly character, mean anything? Silence. Until the Asian American student speaks up.

This road block became even more apparent this week, when we were discussing John A. Williams's novel, Captain Blackman, which is one of the very few texts by an African American written during the time of the Vietnam War. It's also clearly concerned about black historical authority, not only during Vietnam (a war in which a disproportionate number of black soldiers served, and a war that became known as a "race war"), but all of American history. The protagonist, Blackman, is a Vietnam War soldier who blacks out and then find himself transported to the Revolutionary War. So, I ask the students what Williams may be saying about the meaning of the presence of black soldiers in American wars. On the one hand, the novel seems to be calling for their recognition, reminding us that African Americans have served in every war in the nation's history. On the other, it's also critical of that history as one that the "community" should claim, given that all these wars were in the service of a nation that systematically oppressed, betrayed, and violated black people. So I ask the students to ponder whether the Vietnam War, or any war for that matter, could be read as a "race war." No response. I ask if citizenship can indeed be gained through submitting yourself to military service. "Yes, but isn't that the case for everybody?"

That's the go-to answer, it seems. Isn't that the case for everybody? We're all the same. I guess race doesn't matter anymore.

I know I'll have to expect many more exchanges like this in my teaching career. And that's not only fine, but a welcome challenge. The fact that these students can't see beyond their own privilege and have been trained to believe that "multiculturalism" erases racial difference means that my job is even more important than I had thought.

But still, I can't help but wish that I could just teach Ethnic Studies courses for the rest of my life. There's something amazing about gazing out into a class filled with 60 students of color. Or 200 students of color, as was the case with my Intro to Asian American History class last quarter. In the lower-div courses, I do have to make an effort in explaining to the students how structural racism still exists. Some of the Asian American students are conservative. Some can't see beyond their own class privilege to recognize how they're subject to racism. But even in those classes, the students are at least willing to talk about race. And, at the very least, I don't have to convince them of the fact that white privilege exists. They already know that it does, because they've experienced being denied opportunities because of the fact that they're not white. I've encountered some messed up comments in those classes (last quarter, one Chinese American student even tried to justify the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII), but I've never been shut down by a, "Well, doesn't everybody experience that?"

I suppose I could always apply for Ethnic Studies positions again after I've settled into my new job for a while. But the thing is, too, Ethnic Studies positions are few and far in between. And they're oftentimes the first to get cut when universities lose funding. I'm glad I'll be working as an English professor. Really, I am. And the university that hired me is letting me teach anything I want, and they're receptive to my idea of teaching a literature course that's based on critical race theory. They've also mentioned wanting me to develop Ethnic Studies curriculum with other faculty on campus. So I'm sure I'll find plenty of ways to direct my political energies and intellectual investments. Still, I am facing the fact that I may never get another teaching opportunity like the one I have now, where I don't even have to ask the question, "Does race matter?"

How to Become a Professor (When You Don't Know What You Are Doing): Lesson 2-- Work Ass-Backwards

While it may be true that one needs a PhD to become a professor, it is also true that one needs to become a professor to get a PhD. I realize that in saying this I'm speaking from the privileged position of someone with a tenure-track position lined up. I don't want to come off as an asshole who is nonchalantly joking about a system in which most graduates end up jobless. I just want to draw attention to the fact that "normative time" for finishing can certainly vary, depending on the particular standards of your committee members, which are subject to change. While I'm sure my committee members wouldn't have signed off on my dissertation if they didn't think it was good enough to be filed, I also discovered that they weren't nearly as picky about my work after I secured my tenure-track position. Which makes sense-- There's no sense in delaying my graduation and keeping me around if I have a job lined up. But a part of me also wonders if they would have signed off on anything. As my dad likes to joke, "Your degree doesn't count!"

The thing is, finishing a PhD can take a really, really long time. Even if everything goes well-- if you have plenty of funding, your health is good, your family isn't overburdening you, if you know what you're doing-- your advisors could still stall your progress by making you revise revise and revise. My dad told me that when he was a graduate student, a classmate of his got so frustrated with his chair's refusal to let him graduate, that he shot the guy and then shot himself. I've never felt that level of frustration with my committee. (Actually, I complain more often of them not pushing me enough.) But I do have a committee of perfectionists whose level of excellence is something I feel pressured to emulate, even if they don't necessarily impose it on me. And this is why I'm surprised that they so quickly signed off on my dissertation. I was expecting that they would have me take the spring quarter to revise the entire document several times.

So really, the biggest factor that enables you to finish your PhD is to get the job, which is something I'm experiencing now as both a lecturer and someone with a t-t job lined up. Unfortunately, getting the job and teaching are two of the biggest timesucks that can also stall your progress.

The academic job market for literature folks goes like this: Starting in the early fall, schools start posting their job listings (onto databases like the MLA and the Chronicle of Higher Ed), and you look through them all. At the very least, you have to prepare a writing sample (usually a dissertation chapter or a journal article you've written), a cover letter (the most important document you'll write in your entire life), a C.V., and letters of recommendation from at least three advisors (your dissertation committee). Some jobs will ask for more documents, like a teaching portfolio, a dissertation abstract, and a research plan. You send out these documents to all the schools you're applying to. Sometimes you have to cater your documents to different jobs, especially if you're trying to market yourself in different fields. (I applied to positions in Ethnic Studies and English. For English positions, I applied to Ethnic American literature, Asian American literature, 20th Century American literature, and Postcolonial literature positions. So I had several versions of my cover letter.) From August to January, you're constantly visiting the job listings and sending out more materials. If a school puts you on their short list of about 8-12 candidates (out of several hundred), you get a call to meet them at the MLA conference in late December, during your winter break. Until then, you prep for your interview, practicing how to answer all sorts of questions that hopefully your advisors will supply you. You fly out to wherever the conference is taking place that year and do your interviews. If you make it to the school's list of top 3 candidates, you get a call a few weeks later with an invitation for a campus interview, which you then have to prep for. For the campus interview, you get flown out to the school, meet with the faculty, staff, students, administrators. Generally you have to do some form of a presentation, though the particular form varies-- Some schools ask for a research talk, some a research talk and a teaching demonstration, some will ask you to come into someone else's class and teach for the day. When your campus interview is done, you go home and bite your nails until you get a call again. Hopefully, it's a job offer. If it isn't, then you either plan to do this whole process all over again in the next fall, or your start looking at the spring listings and do this process all over again. It's kind of a ridiculous amount of work for a job that you might end up hating. Needless to say, I didn't get much of my dissertation written during the time that I was going through this process.

Teaching generally takes up a ton of time, whether you're doing it as a full-time or part-time employee. These last few months, I've been teaching two very different courses at two very different campuses, one of which is a class I had never taught before. When I'm teaching a class for the first time, it's not uncommon that I'll spend 5 hours of prep for 1 hour of class time. And one of my advisors tells me that I'm in good shape-- She'll take 10 to 1. This is why graduate students are not encouraged to teach-- It takes too much of your time, and ultimately what determines your career is a finished dissertation. But fellowships become more of a rarity, especially at public universities that are experiencing budget crises. I have had to teach or work for the university in some other capacity every quarter that I've been a graduate student. And I've been asked to teach classes that professors typically teach, from large GE classes to upper-division. So I've basically worked as a professor that the university can hire for cheap.

Which brings me back to my first point: One must be a professor in order to get a PhD. And I don't mean in the sense that teaching helps you become a better scholar, though that is indeed true. I mean being a professor means that you are no longer a student.

Because I had not quite finished my dissertation by the time I secured my t-t job, and because the budget problems in my university and the scarcity of funding opportunities have determined that advanced graduate students can no longer teach at the university after a certain number of quarters, I had figured that I was going to have to go on filing fee for the spring quarter. (Filing fee means that you have nothing left to do but finish your dissertation. You pay a modest fee instead of your tuition, but it also means that you have no access to the school's facilities or employment. And you have to buy your own health insurance.) At the very end of last quarter, though, the Asian American Studies department, where I've been teaching for several years now, asked if I could substitute for a professor who is taking a sudden leave of absence. As a student, I would not be able to get this gig-- I had exceeded my teaching quarters, and was told that my appeal for an additional quarter was going to be denied. Going on filing fee would have meant that I could not be employed by the university. So my only viable option was to graduate so that the department could hire me as a lecturer. I knew I would need the income, so I pushed for this.

I wrote to my committee members about my situation. Because they had already deemed my dissertation good enough to be filed, they had already supplied their signatures. But they still preferred to have more time to review my entire document and give me comments before letting me file. Fortunately, they're also very sympathetic individuals who didn't want to deny me a source of income, so they agreed to let me file and give me comments afterwards. That is how I ended up finishing my PhD during what just might be the busiest time in my life.

I do feel good about the document I ended up submitting. But I also recognize that there's a whole lot that could be improved. That's always going to be case, though, which is why finishing a PhD takes a really, really long time.

Asian Girl Professors Everywhere

I TA-ed for an Asian Girl Professor (that is, a young-ish Asian American female professor) who told me that it is really really hard to become an Asian Girl Professor. Asian American women are the least likely to finish their PhD programs, least likely to get hired, least likely to get promoted, least likely to get tenured, least likely to get endowed chairs, etc...

I do not know if this is true. I imagine there must be some research done on attrition rates in higher education and the demographics of university educators that might confirm this, but I'll let people who specialize in that sort of thing dig that out. True or not, this depressing statistic certainly feels true. I've had many White Dude Professors. And White Women Professors. But until I took a seminar with a South Asian woman who at the time was a junior faculty member a few years ago, I had never been taught by an Asian woman.

I knew that Asian female professors existed in my undergraduate institution. And I see them where I am attending graduate school. But I am also aware of the fact that both schools belong to a university system in which there is such a thing as Ethnic Studies and/or Asian American Studies. Indeed, all the professors I know who happen to be Asian American (including the one who warned me of how difficult it is to be an Asian woman in academia) either belong to an Asian American Studies/Ethnic Studies department or are the token Asian American specialist in a department like American Studies or English. In the position that I will be starting in the fall, I will be one of two Asians (the other is a South Asian man who does Postcolonial Studies), and certainly the only Asian woman in the English department. I was hired as an Asian American literature specialist.

So, as one can imagine, in most universities in the U.S., there isn't a need or demand for even that token Asian Americanist. This means that in most universities, there are no avenues through which Asian folks can break into the academy. East Asian Studies might be an exception, but only to a certain degree-- Universities will often have departments devoted to studying China, Japan, Korea, etc. So Asian women may be hired there. Though also, from what I've seen, these departments also hire a lot of white people who specialize in Asian Studies. Aforementioned Asian Girl Professor, for example, was the first Filipina to be hired as a tenure-track professor specializing in the Philippines. Prior to her, folks doing work on the Philippines have been white men. (Damn colonialism.) So yes, if you are Asian and American, finding a place in academia can be tricky. There are some who manage to make it into the profession without doing anything Asian or Asian American related-- I know one young-ish Asian American professor who does Medieval Studies, for example. But if universities won't hire Asian folks as experts of Asian history and culture, I imagine they would be even less inclined to hire them as experts of white history and culture. Racism sucks.

Aside from these institutional factors, Asian women also have to deal with the day-to-day experiences of being, well, Asian women. It's not only my mother who says that I look like a little girl pretending to be a professor. Colleagues, professors, even my students often view me in that way. A classmate of mine, a white woman who is only a few years older than me, used to always comment on my small stature and pat me on the head. Students will often ask me how old I am. (I doubt they'll ask their Old White Dude Professor the same question.) At a recent job interview, one faculty member mistook me for an undergraduate. Here's the funny thing, though-- I actually don't think I look all that young. I see the faint lines forming at the edges of my eyes, the white hairs popping out of my head. I look exactly as one my age should look, I think. I don't dress like a teeny-bopper or talk with a baby voice. So I know that people's tendency to view me as a little girl is a projection of their own internalized notions about Asian women being young and docile or whatever. Orientalism sucks.

I've learned to not get too angry when these things happen, and to just accept them as a fact that I'll just have to deal with and negotiate. Still, I wonder to what extent have I internalized how people seem to view me. I wonder if I've ever underestimated myself or failed to fight for my interest because I felt marked as an Asian girl. And I wonder to what extent I've grown a chip on my shoulder because of it.

Every quarter that I've taught at Yuppie Cowtown U, a school in which a disproportionately large portion of the undergraduate population is Asian American, there has always been at least one student, usually Asian, usually a girl (but sometimes a boy), who comes to my office. She won't ask me questions about the course material, but about my life trajectory. She'll ask me how I decided to major in English, to go to grad school, to become a professor. So I know that at least for her, my being an Asian Girl Professor at the podium, in a position of authority, relaying my expertise, commanding attention, means something, just as my meeting other Asian Girl Professors means something to me.

So I guess that's why I've named this blog Asian Girl Professor-- I know that my breaking into this profession is indebted to the work of Asian women who came before me, and I hope that my making it will also enable other Asian women to do the same.