This talk will explore the vexing question, “How do you verify someone is Chinese?” What constitutes being “Chinese” — physical attributes, the language you speak, where you were born, your family’s culture, or other characteristics? Please join anthropologist ChorSwang Ngin and attorney Diane Young-Spitzer in a conversation about ChorSwang’s work verifying the identity of Chinese Indonesians claiming persecution in Indonesia due to their Chinese identity when applying for asylum in the United States.
ChorSwang is a former student of Mrs. Lin at Wellesley. She is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles where she is the founder of the B.A. Degree program in Asian and Asian American Studies (AAAS) and co-founder of the College of Ethnic Studies, the second in the USA. She has consulted for the World Bank on the “Involuntary Resettlement” of four populations affected by bank-funded building of four hydroelectric dams in China. After visiting Xinjiang, she co-authored a play “The Houseguest from Xinjiang” to encourage difficult conversations. She spent 20 years as an anthropological expert witness in US federal courts helping asylum seekers from several Asian countries. Her book Identities on Trial in the United States: Asylum Seekers from Asia (Lexington 2018) won the 2019 GAD Award of the American Anthropological Association for public anthropology. She was an Academic Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University in 2019. At Cal State LA she won the Outstanding Professor Award in 2018.
