To celebrate Women’s History Month 2010, I am writing this essay to share my experiences as an Asian Pacific American (APA) woman and as a faculty member in a Midwestern university. Hopefully, this short narrative can help other young APA female faculty in universities and colleges nationwide to transition from being a Ph.D. student to becoming a tenure-track assistant professor. Before I discuss this topic further, let me first briefly introduce myself. 

I spent my adolescent years growing up in the Boston area.  In 2002, I graduated from the Ph.D. program in history at the Ohio State University. It was at Ohio State that I decided to write my dissertation on women’s status in Taiwan within the context of the island’s relationships with modern China, Japan, and the U.S.  This research project helped me to deepen my understanding about my bicultural heritage as a Taiwanese American.

In 2003, I received a job offer at Wichita State University (WSU) in Kansas. Although both Ohio State and WSU are urban universities in the Midwest, the number of APA faculty and students at Ohio State is much larger than that of WSU.  In fact, it is fairly typical for a Ph.D. student to graduate from a large research university and then accept a job offer at a smaller university or college.

As a junior faculty in the WSU women’s studies department, I developed my teaching and research interests in cross-cultural women’s studies, Asian studies, and Asian American studies. During my first six years as a junior faculty, I befriended three APA colleagues with similar research and teaching interests. But since many APA faculty prefer to live in the Northeast or the West Coast, all three colleagues eventually left Wichita. Consequently, I was left without colleagues in WSU to share and discuss my research ideas. Meanwhile, in the midst of my busy routine of “publish or perish,” I lost contact with many of my classmates in the Ph.D. program at Ohio State.  In retrospect, I still have fond memories of my classmates in the Ph.D. program.  We used to study together to help each other pass the qualifying exams. This is why it is important for junior faculty who receive job offers in smaller institutions not to lose contact with their classmates and professors in the Ph.D. programs. These old professional acquaintances and friendships can help you weather the storms of tenure and promotion reviews by providing emotional support and professional advice, including selecting appropriate academic journals and presses to publish your research findings.   

At WSU, I was fortunate enough to be hired in an interdisciplinary and racially diverse women’s studies department.  Within my department, I don’t feel like a minority. But as a medium-size university in the Midwest, APA constitutes approximately 10 percent of the WSU faculty. Since the vast majority of APA faculty university-wide are male professors in fields such as math, business administration, engineering, and natural sciences, my status as an APA female faculty in social sciences/humanities can be characterized as an even smaller minority. This is why it is so important for an APA female faculty to maintain good professional contacts outside of her university. 

In 2009, I was fortunate enough to be granted tenure and promotion to associate professor upon publishing my book on women’s movements in twentieth-century Taiwan. Without the emotional support of my parents in Ohio and my close circle of friends, it would have been much more difficult to go through six years of constant pressure to balance my teaching and service responsibilities with the expectations of “publish or perish.”

At WSU, there are several courses offered on Asian American experiences and Asian studies. However, in a couple of diversity panels I have attended on campus, discussions of diversity generally assumed a Black/white paradigm. Whenever this happens in our campus communities, we need to gently remind our colleagues and students that there has been a demographic transition in this nation.  Races that are neither Black nor white have also participated in the American experience. As APA college faculty and students, we need to advocate for more public programming and courses taught on Asian American experiences to raise the general public’s awareness of our contributions to the U.S. society.