Welcome to the Asian American Studies Tarot Card website, which features outstanding and provocative student projects from Prof. Judy Wu’s spring 2018 course: ASAM 51: U.S.-Asia. This course explores how the relationship between the U.S. and Asia, predominantly during the second half of the 20th century, has shaped Asian America. Collectively, we explored how war and militarism, international relations, and globalization have influenced migration, racialization, politics, economic practices, sexuality, family formation, cultural identity, and activism among Asian Americans.
The projects were based on the following books:
- Mark Padoongpatt, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America(California, 2017)
- Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (Rutgers, 2016)
- Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017)
- Asian American Tarot Cards, published by Asian American Literary Review in Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health
For the final project, the students turned to the the tarot cards as inspiration to reflect on important themes and topics from the class. They wrote poetry and essays, crafted tumblr and websites, and created their own tarot cards to reflect on how U.S.-Asia relations have shaped Asian America. Here is a sample of 13 outstanding projects from the course! Special thanks to teaching assistants Christopher Chamberlin and Cherish Bolton for mentoring these student projects and Ethan Teng for creating this website!
Judy Wu
Professor and Chair
Department of Asian American Studies
University of California, Irvine
(949) 824-4207
j.wu@uci.edu