This panel examines the hidden histories of migration across Asia and the Asian American diaspora, through a range of papers that draws upon a fruitful engagement with the
conceptual framework of Global Asias. Following up on the panel sponsored by Verge: Studies of Global Asias on the same theme, this panel also centers an intersectional approach to hitherto neglected transnational Asian migration stories, uncovering the role of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in shaping displacement, resistance, and survival. Through a focus on literature, story-telling, and historographic analysis anchored in feminist and queer thought, the papers here decolonize hidden histories of transnational Asian migration. In the process, they interrogate conventional geopolitical frames of the borders and boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora. This interdisciplinary engagement with Asian movement and transit, links scattered geographies across Asia and the United States; we hope and contend that it offers new, aspirational ways to reimagine activism, identity, belonging, and collective struggle today.

Margie Tang-Oxley narrates the multiple migrations across China and the US of Cold War culinary ambassador, Grace Zia Chu, to reveal how Asian Americans weaponized their gender, race, and lived experiences to craft an embodied performance of the model minority myth. Wonjeong Kim and Corinna Barrett Percy examine two memoirs by biracial Asian American women and argue that as the authors strive to restore their connection with their maternal heritage and Asian identity through their individual memories and personal storytelling, they also reveal the marginalization of Asian women immigrants, whose voices are oppressed by the cultural, social, and political barriers of American patriarchy and imperialism. Min Kyung Boo sheds light on the immigration history of South Korean “military brides” to examine the Asian American trope of survival in the transnational context of U.S. military imperialism. Following Kuan-hsing Chen’s concept of inter-Asian referencing as a decolonial and de-imperial research methodology, Kai Cheang’s paper analyzes accounts of Yuli Riswati’s experience as an Indonesian domestic worker in Taiwan and Hong Kong to propose and model an ethic of femin-queer engagement that interpellates a reading counter-public that is critical of global racial capitalism. Attentive to how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape these hidden histories, this panel engages a Global Asias approach to disclose transnational Asian displacement and migration practices in ways that challenge hegemonic ideas about racialized and gendered citizenship, the imperial state, and capital.