Advocating for Change

Even now, Erica Yang ’10 remembers with vivid detail her arrival in the United States. It was pushing midnight in late August of 2007, and the then-15-year-old had just weathered a long flight from her home city of Ningbo, China, to Manchester, New Hampshire.

 

Yang, who was armed with a quiet intelligence and shaky English, struggled to make sense of her surroundings in the dark. More than 7,000 miles from her family, towing two large suitcases that essentially amounted to her life’s belongings, she says she felt both the rush of excitement to be headed to St. Paul’s School and an intense uncertainty about what this new life would mean for her.

 

“It was this crazy culture shock,” recalls Yang. “It was hard, and I felt lonely. I had this new life that was very unlike what I had in China. It was a huge, difficult transformation.”

 

Slowly, however, Yang found her way. She made friends at St. Paul’s, established important connections with faculty, and found command of not just her English but her new life. She took up Nordic skiing, adored American comedy (South Park and Saturday Night Live were particular favorites), and taught Chinese language classes. There was a part of her that relished the opportunity to try new things. Maybe Yang would have transitioned out of what she describes as her “socially awkward” phase regardless of where she’d gone to school, but she credits SPS for at least expediting the process.

 

After high school, Yang followed a sort of American success story. She went to the University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in legal studies and business administration. Then it was on to law school at the University of Chicago. Today, Yang is an associate attorney specializing in private credit finance at an international law firm not far from where she earned her law degree. She makes a good salary and likes where she lives. It’s a life that, in many respects, appears to be a million miles from Yang’s early days in the States. But, over the last year, as the pandemic has exacerbated the challenges many Asian Americans face in navigating day-to-day life in the U.S., that distance between then and now has not felt as significant. Yang felt vulnerable when she arrived in America, and she’s feeling vulnerable once again.

 

“With people saying things against China and people saying things against all Asians,” she says, “it’s just made me feel scared.”

 

When Yang spoke with Alumni Horae by phone from her apartment in Chicago in mid-March, it was just days after a mass shooting at three Atlanta-area massage parlors that left eight people dead, including six Asian American women. The murders, along with an attack of an Asian American woman in New York City just two weeks later, headlined what has become a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes that has gripped the country and resulted in a 150 percent increase in crimes against Asian Americans in 2020.

 

While those kinds of developments have made Yang feel less secure about her own personal safety, they re-confirmed her decision last spring to use her skills to help Chicago’s Asian community lessen the vulnerability they feel in their own lives.

 

In June of 2020, Yang co-founded Lawyers Helping Our Community (LHOC), a free legal clinic that assists Chicago’s non-English-speaking Chinatown community with a range of civil issues, from insurance claims to evictions to immigration matters. LHOC operates under the umbrella of Chicago Volunteer Legal Services (CVLS), which has provided pro bono legal services to low-income communities in Chicago for more than 50 years. While LHOC recruits its own volunteer attorneys and students, and handles its cases independently, CVLS provides malpractice insurance and administrative assistance. Completed cases are recorded in their system.

 

“It’s a community that has suffered a lot,” says Yang. “Language is a big barrier during normal times, but, because the pandemic has closed so many legal clinics, there’s nowhere for people to seek help. We thought this would be a good opportunity to fill the gap and help people who are suffering.”

 

In the short time since opening its doors, LHOC has brought on more than 80 volunteer attorneys and law students to help its cause. The clinic meets with clients virtually and has taken on nearly 50 cases since its launch. Yang says the range of work has varied widely. In one instance, LHOC worked with a client who was suffering from health and financial hardship as a result of a 2017 car accident. Working with a collection agency, Yang was able to significantly reduce the man’s debt and help lift him out of homelessness. In another case, LHOC assisted a young Chinese woman and first-time business owner with government forms and other paperwork so she could open up a beauty spa. Last summer, the clinic assisted a Korean couple in working with their insurance company after their storefront had been decimated by anti-police riots.

 

“So many business owners have no experience with these things,” says Yang, “so they need help in navigating the legal environment.”

 

Like any small nonprofit, LHOC also has proven nimble. Since the start of 2021, and in the days following the Atlanta shootings in particular, the clinic has taken on an increased presence in raising greater awareness around the country’s growing anti-Asian sentiment.

 

In late March, LHOC served as a conduit to its community to amplify events and conferences that combat Asian hate. Most notably, the group teamed with the Asian/Pacific Islander American Chamber of Commerce and Entrepreneurship (ACE), a national lobbying group for Asian business owners, for an online campaign. Around that same time, Yang’s organization co-sponsored a Rally for Community Safety – Stop Anti-Asian Hate Crime demonstration. Yang took on a leadership role for the event, which also saw LHOC push forward several proposals for creating safer communities for Asian Americans across the country. For Yang, the work has proven to be both personal and professional.

 

“I know I’m more privileged than many of the clients we are helping,” she says. “Especially the older generation. They came here to start a business, without any real educational background – certainly not to attend a school like St. Paul’s. They didn’t have the financial support of their family like I did. At the same time, I do have an understanding for what they are experiencing. I do know what that vulnerability feels like, not just because I immigrated to this country. When my parents visit, I see it in them. Because they don’t speak English, a lot of the same things I see in the people we are trying to help, I see my parents experience. The fears and anxieties – they are real things that have an effect on life.”

 

As she takes on an increasingly visible role in advocating for Chicago’s Chinatown community, Yang is drawing from the kind of empowerment and support she found more than a decade ago as a student at SPS. Today, others are walking in Yang’s footsteps. The School’s current self-identifying Asian enrollment, which is 17 percent of the entire student body, is expanding the conversation around the issues that contribute to the discrimination they’ve felt in their personal lives and have seen across the country.

 

In late March, Victoria Chen ’21, in a Concord Monitor article about anti-Asian sentiment in New Hampshire, relayed an account about a racist taunt she’d received a year before, at the start of the pandemic, while walking with a friend in Concord. Chen told the Monitor’s Julia Stinneford that a car slowed down, and a man rolled down the window and shouted, “Ew, she’s going to give me the coronavirus!” Chen said she sat with the moment for months, unsure if she could or should say something.

 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she told the newspaper. “Is it wrong for me to not have defended myself? Was it wrong for me to just let it pass?”

 

She eventually decided she needed to tell others about what she experienced. “I think there’s no going back, especially because of all the hate against Asian Americans,” she added. “There’s no trying to fit in anymore.”

 

Chen is not alone in her advocacy. In the Winter Term, SPS student groups led the “Stop Asian Hate” All Community Meeting and also a series of community conversations in observance of Women’s History Month and Founder’s Day on the subject of anti-Asian hate and violence.

 

Those events, says Associate Dean of Admission Michelle Hung, faculty adviser to the SPS Women of Color group, resulted from the groundwork laid earlier in the academic year by SPS Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives Bethany Dickerson Wynder. Her “leadership and setting of expectations,” says Hung, helped direct the School’s different affinity groups in engaging the broader community around the issues that mean the most to them.

 

“SPS affinity and alliance groups have played a critical role in co-designing and implementing these events,” says Wynder. “We have developed a model that works, and we will work to enhance it in the weeks and months ahead. Culture change often results when more community members feel a sense of ownership and belonging at SPS.”

 

The community discussions were spearheaded by four main student groups: The SPS Women of Color, Justice and Social Equality for Asians, the SPS Asian Society, and the SPS Indian Society. One of the pillars of being an Episcopal school, notes Wynder, is a commitment to social justice.

 

“St. Paul’s School is consistently called to stand for racial justice for all,” says Wynder. “During these challenging times, creating and holding space for students and faculty who self-identify as Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to voice some of their lived experiences during critical conversations is an important part of fostering a safe and healthy community.”

 

At the March “Stop Asian Hate” meeting, 140 SPS students, faculty, and staff turned out for the one-hour Zoom event, which featured three breakout rooms on intersectionality, stereotypes, and model minority myth. In addition, the discussion provided action items that touched on such things as how to properly pronounce Asian names, ways to become a better listener, the importance of checking in on Asian and Asian American friends, how to support local Asian-owned businesses, and learning about the wide spectrum of different Asian ethnicities.

 

These discussions, says Sonia Bhate ’22, student head of SPS Women of Color, are important in not just helping non-Asians become better allies to their Asian friends, but also sparking greater awareness among Asians about the issues they face as a broader community. She says plans are in the works for more of these meetings to be held in the future.

 

“As a South Asian, I have spent the past year learning how to support and be an ally to East Asians,” Bhate says. “As an Asian, I am grouped with people who have a completely different struggle than I do. This past year has opened my eyes to the stark contrast between my struggle and the people whom I am categorized with. ​It has been a year of education and empathy.”

 

In May, SPS celebrated Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Among the events was a BIPOC student art show proposed by Tim Mei ’21.

 

For many Americans, the past several years have been a crash course in the realities of racial tension and discrimination – even for those who’ve had the unfortunate experience of weathering those realities on a personal level.

 

It’s why Erica Yang tacked on as many as 20 extra hours per week to her full-time schedule to get her legal clinic launched last spring. It’s why she’s affiliated LHOC with the broader work that has risen up to combat anti-Asian hate. And it’s why she hopes to one day see the clinic replicated in other cities across the United States – once the pandemic recedes into the background. She believes that, in places like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, where Asian American populations are the highest in the country, there’s a growing need for the kind of services a clinic, like the one she developed in Chicago, can provide.

 

“The pandemic was a trigger to start it, but this need is never going to be satisfied,” says Yang. “I’ve had this trajectory of going to St. Paul’s, going to college, going to law school, and now working at this large international law firm. It’s a privilege for me, and if I can use my experience and background to give back to my own community and to give back to people who are facing some of the same things I faced when I first got here, that is very meaningful.”