About AAAYA
AAAYA is a loosely organized group of alumni who initially came together in the 1980s around the idea of a community service program for Yale undergraduates. The AAAYA Tina E. Yeh Summer Community Service Fellowship Program
is made possible entirely through volunteer hours and the generous support of
alumni members. If you are a member of the Class of '01, we want to stay in
touch with you! Please send your name and post-graduation address to:
AAAYA or e-mail to
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A Brief History of Amerasia Journal and Yale AASA By Don T. Nakanishi, from an e-mail message
to the AAAYA discussion group, July 6, 2001
At the urging of Grant Din, let me share a brief history of Amerasia
Journal and Yale AASA.
Amerasia Journal began as a publication of the Yale AASA. It evolved
from the first AASA newsletter, published in late Fall 1969, called
BANANA PEAL (not "peel" because of what it was intended to do),
shortly after AASA was founded (and simultaneously, when the first
group of women entered Yale College). The undergraduate Asian
American student population was at its then all-time record high of
59 women and men (out of 4750 total undergrads)!
The idea for a journal that would publish the best academic and
creative work on Asian Americans evolved from informal discussions
between me and Lowell Chun-Hoon, who was also in the class of '71. He
hailed from Punahou School in Honolulu, and was a fantastic writer.
He is now a prominent labor attorney in HI. I had attended Roosevelt
High School in East LA, and like Lowell had been involved in writing
and journalism for years. In Spring 1970, we both took the first
Asian American Studies class at Yale, which AASA had organized with
the assistance of the first Japanese American tenured professor at
Yale, the late Chitoshi Yanaga of the Political Science Dept. It was
the first AAS class on the East Coast. It was also around the time that
AASA urged the admissions office to do special recruitment for Asian
American students; held the first Asian American student conference
in the East; and took a stand of solidarity with other students of
color during the Bobby Seale trial in New Haven.
During the class, Lowell and I became appalled by the paucity of
research on Asian Americans at the time. We also, with a mixture of naiveté
and arrogance (they go together often), thought that we could
start a national journal to address the problem. We agreed that we
would each raise $500 during the summer of 1970 as seed money to put
out our first issue during our senior year, 1970-71. That was a lot
of money in those days. Lowell raised his share, and I didn't
(because I was doing research for my senior thesis). That's how
Lowell became the editor, and I became the publisher. He had first
crack at job titles for the journal.
Our first issue of Amerasia came out in early 1971. Its front cover
graphic was designed by Billie Tsien ('71), who is now a renowned
architect in NY, and featured articles largely by Yale AASA members,
including Bill Lann Lee ('71), who was the asst. attorney general for
civil rights under Clinton, and Rocky Chin (then a grad student in
urban planning at Yale), who is now running for NY city council. Our editorial board also included Henry Hayase, who was in the class
of 1973. Henry passed away in the mid-80s after kidney failure, and
we raised funds to establish an academic prize at Yale in his name to
recognize the outstanding senior thesis on an Asian American Studies
topic. It continues to be awarded to this day, and it is great to see
that so many Yale seniors have written theses about so many
fascinating Asian American topics. Yale, by the way, now has three
assistant professors -- all Asian American women -- who teach and do
research in Asian American Studies. We published two issues of Amerasia in 1971 while Lowell and I were
seniors. We knew that it would be difficult for the journal to
survive financially at Yale. We approached the UCLA Asian American
Studies Center, which had been founded in 1969 as a research and
teaching center, about the possibility of co-sponsoring the journal. They agreed and hired Lowell to a half-time position on their staff,
and Amerasia relocated to UCLA. It was co-published by AASA and the
UCLA Center for several years, and then became an exclusive
publication of UCLA's Center. It has published continuously to this
day for thirty years, and is the leading journal in the field of
Asian American Studies.
If you'd like to subscribe, drop me a line.
Don
PS After we published our first issue, we learned that there had been
another publication called AMERASIA, which came under attack during
the McCarthy era because of its leftist positions on Asia. Also,
before we settled on Banana Peal as the name for the first AASA
newsletter, we tossed around various names. One name that was
suggested by Peter Choy, who is now general counsel for Sun Computers
in Silicon Valley, was "Euthanasia". It sounded okay, but we didn't
quite think its meaning would be too appealing to other Asian
American students on campus!
PPS If you are interested, you can read about some of the early
history of Yale AASA in NIcholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, which
deals with the SAT, meritocracy, race, etc. There are some chapters
focusing on Alice Young ('7l), a prominent NY corporate attorney,
Bill Lann Lee, and me.
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