When the Seeds of Youth Flower:
From Childhood to 2020
About the Project
A Collaborative Digital History Project
Our project is an effort to document the stories of Asian American immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice protests of the year 2020. We concentrate on the formative stages of our narrators’ lives, particularly their childhood experiences, to examine how early exposure to social structures of race, class, culture, and gender shape their interactions and encounters with the events of this year. Through this interactive, multi-media website, we hope to illuminate the weight that one’s early years in life can carry, and how the past can manifest itself in the present in many salient forms.
Meet The Team
I am a senior majoring in History with a concentration on the History and Law track at Stanford. Not only did this project afford me the invaluable opportunity to interview my grandmother, I also got to know her on a much deeper and more meaningful level from both a personal and historical vantage point. I am excited to serve as a conduit to introduce the stories of our three narrators as well as the critical value of oral history. The field of oral history is a wonderful avenue through which we can study the dialogue of history, bridge existent gaps, and cultivate empathy.
Betty Lee
I’m a first-generation and low-income college student (FLI) student majoring in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis and a potential minor in Asian American Studies. I’m currently in my senior year at Stanford, and for this project, I interviewed my father, Kang-min Lee. Through this experience, not only was my father able to tell a story that he never would have shared otherwise, I got to hear a family history that I had been complete unaware of. Interviewing my father, and seeing all of the interviews of various members of the Asian American community, have made me realize how empowering and necessary it is to know our own histories.
Cathy Nguyen
I am a junior majoring in Human Biology, concentrating on Health Policy with a lens on Health Disparities, and minoring in Human Rights. I interviewed Ann, a former college preparation mentor of mine throughout high school. As a first-generation low-income college student, I took from Ann; her advice, her knowledge, her resources to catapult my dreams and goals. As I interviewed her, I was able to look back on past memories with her from a new light, but I also learned the importance of bridging generational understandings and the power of storytelling. I got to know her in a way I wasn't able to before: selflessly.
