Emma Gee

Emma Gee (1939 – April 15, 2023) was an American activist, scholar and writer, best known for helping to coin the term "Asian American" and co-founding the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) with her husband, Yuji Ichioka.

After establishing the first-ever AAPA chapter in Berkeley, California, Gee was influential in guiding the organization through social advocacy, notably by supporting the Third World Liberation Strikes of 1968 and helping to extend AAPA beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also known for her writing efforts, notably editing and contributing to Asian Women (1971) and Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976), the latter in collaboration with the Pacific Asian American Women Writers West (PAAWWW).

Personal life By 1963, Gee was a student at Columbia University where she met Yuji Ichioka, a graduate student pursuing a master's degree in Chinese history.

Citing dissatisfaction with Columbia's academic program, Emma Gee and Ichioka relocated to the University of California, Berkeley, where they completed their graduate studies. Gee and Ichioka's date of marriage is unclear from public records, but from Ichioka's 2002 eulogy in the Los Angeles Times, it was reported that the couple had been married for over 25 years, indicating they wed by the late 1970s. they also credited her with having a significant impact on issues affecting women, immigrants, workers, communities of color, and the broader public.

Activism Originating the term "Asian American" While completing their PhD programs at the University of California, Berkeley in May 1968, Gee and Ichioka established the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) in Berkeley, California. Gee and Ichioka would later specify that the term "Asian American" and AAPA itself were intended to provide cohesion and consolidation between "'all of us Americans of Asian descent'" during the intersectional civil rights movements of the 1960s, not dissimilar from the origin of the terms African-American or Latin American. The term Asian American replaced the previously used term "Oriental," which had a discriminatory history as a derogatory and archaic label often used to denigrate immigrants and ethnic-descendants of the eastern hemisphere in contrast to the western hemisphere (particularly western Europe and the United States) with the term "Occidental." A common consensus which emerged around the new term was its emphasis on marginalized Asian-descent communities' shared histories and identities through labor and social integration struggles as "Americans," and not as perceived "foreigners," an umbrella label bearing ample stigma. However, the couple had observed that many PFP student activists of Asian descent were participating on an individual basis, and not as a collective front, in contrast to other ethnic coalitions such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) which were experiencing higher volumes of visibility. Seeing an opening to establish their own PFP-aligned caucus due to their shared feelings of marginalization from both leadership and participation in simultaneous social movements (such as the Free Huey protests in the summer of 1968 with the BPP), Gee and Ichioka presented AAPA as the consolidated front of Asian American mobilization which they felt deprived of in the PFP. In addition to Gee and Ichioka, there was Richard Aoki, a militant activist with the BPP and a fellow graduate colleague of Ichioka's; Floyd Huen, president of the Chinese Student Club at UC Berkeley; Victor Ichioka, Yuji Ichioka's younger brother; and Vicci Wong, a UC Berkeley undergraduate organizer with the SNCC and UFW in Salinas. Wong would later recall that some of AAPA's early participants and members, including herself, were individually contacted by Gee and Ichioka based on their traditionally-Asian surnames from local student rosters at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University (SF State, formerly San Francisco State College), as well as PFP petitions which had been circulated by the pair. After the success of the strikes, the Berkeley AAPA chapter began to struggle with membership retention, and sought to redirect their efforts towards strengthening Asian American Studies (AAS) and community project works, with the San Francisco chapter following suit. As the couple recruited for AAPA, their relationship to each other and later other initial AAPA participants including Lilian Fabros (of Filipino descent), Vicci Wong (of Chinese descent), and Richard Aoki (of Japanese descent) further emphasized the initial AAPA goal of pan-Asian ethnic unity, particularly with Gee and Ichioka's emphasis on inclusive recruitment methods.

Asian Women (1971) In the winter of 1971, UC Berkeley offered the first Asian American women's course ever – a proseminar titled Asian Studies 170. The result was an extensive collection of personal narratives about identity, published in Asian Women (1971).

The book was organized into several sections: an introduction, Part I: Herstory, Part II: Reflections, Part III: Third World Woman, Part IV: Politics of Womanhood, and a bibliography and acknowledgements. Gee not only contributed to this collection as an editor but also as a writer. Under Part I: Herstory, Gee authored a piece titled "Issei: The First Women," which was later reprinted as "Issei Women". This work was Gee's personal exploration of what Lowell Chun-Hoon described in a review as "the agonies of Issei womanhood".

Gee highlighted the harsh conditions faced by new immigrants. She noted how mothers were often only given three days of postnatal rest before returning to fieldwork, and how many women had to serve as their own midwives. The authors focused on the emergence of specific Asian immigrant politics in the United States based on the international affairs in the home countries of the immigrants and the profound discrimination Asian immigrants were experiencing in their everyday lives in the United States during the time of Asian exclusion. This anthology served as one of the first textbooks in Asian American studies and remains a foundational work in the field. Gee personally emphasized that all academic inquiries begin with questions that carry embedded assumptions. Drawing on the work of Susanne K. Langer, Gee argued that the way questions are formulated defines the framework within which facts are interpreted, thereby influencing which answers are considered valid. During the 1970s and 1980s, collectives of female writers and artists began to organize cultural and literary groups. One of these groups was the Pacific Asian American Women Writers West, which is also known as PAAWWW (pronounced "pow"), or PAAWW–West, which was founded in 1978. The Asian American Studies Center, one of the first academic institutions in the US devoted to the study of Asian American experiences, was founded at UCLA thanks in part to their leadership.

In 2004, UCLA's Asian American Studies Center established the "Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee Endowment for Social Justice and Immigration Studies" to honor Ichioka and Gee's contributions to the advancement of Asian Americans. The endowment also provided key support for a student- and community-based forum regarding the 30th anniversary of the freeing of Chol Soo Lee, a Korean American immigrant who was wrongfully convicted of murder.

In 2014, Gee came to a UCLA celebration of the completion of this fund, in which she was honored as one of the veterans of the center with decades of faithful service for the completion of the Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee Endowment in Social Justice and Immigration Studies with a celebration May 17 at Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles.

In 2018, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of AAPA in May 1968, the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project designated the former residence of Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka at 2005 Hearst Avenue—a site that had served as AAPA's headquarters—as a city historical landmark. Gee was not personally in attendance, but fellow AAPA co-founders Vicci Wong and Floyd Huen—along with his wife, former Oakland mayor Jean Quan, who became involved in AAPA shortly after its formation—were among the roughly three dozen attendees at the dedication.

The same year she was mentioned in TIME magazine because she contributed to the creation of the term "Asian American" in 1968.

Gee died on April 15, 2023, at the age of 84.

Impact

Model Minority Myth As the term "Asian American" was being created by Gee and Yuji Ichioka, simultaneously, the concept of there being a "model minority" among American people of color was gaining traction among Americans, namely white, Conservative thinkers, in efforts to paint Black Americans as lazy and unsuccessful within academic and professional spaces, contrastingly stereotyped Asian Americans as ambitious, well-mannered, and high-achieving.

Concept of Intersectionality Throughout her career Intersectionality served as a core tenant of her beliefs. As a female Asian American advocate, academic, and mentor, Gee demonstrated the importance of intersectionality within the Asian American activist space, especially during a time when women's voices were often sidelined. Indirectly, Gee helped lay the groundwork for Asian American women to create spaces for their own activism. While Asian American activism started gaining traction throughout the country, the Asian American activist groups and Black American activist groups increasingly worked together in solidarity to advocate for their mutual equal rights. These groups' cooperation and allyship would lay the groundwork for the concept of intersectionality.

Role in feminism Gee made significant contributions to the feminist movement by increasing the reach of feminist activism towards the experiences of women of color, particularly Asian American women. During the 1970s, mainstream feminism particularly reflected the perspectives of middle-class white women while often overlooking the unique struggles that came with minority women. Gee’s work recognizes this gap by creating spaces where Asian American voices could be heard and represented within the feminist sphere and broader U.S social discourse. In her edited collection Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976), she collected many articles highlighting the struggles and experiences of women. Through this collection and other works like Shopping Bag, a monologue exploring the struggles of an elderly Chinese immigrant woman, Gee introduced minority perspectives that have previously received limited attention and feminist circles. Her efforts helped expand the scope of feminism to embrace the experiences of women, regardless of their racial or cultural background.

Works