Julia Guo, CC '22, On Connecting With Her Asian American Identity Through Her Sorority

Upper West Side NY

26 May, 2022

3:52 PM

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By Esther Sun, Columbia Daily Spectator • May 26, 2022, 2:44 AM Coming from a high school where about half of the student body was Asian, Julia Guo, CC '22, said that when she was younger, listening to K-pop was "about as deep as [she] ever got" into thinking about Asian identity. However, Guo said coming to Columbia caused her perspective to shift on her community and identity, which she says she previously took for granted. Guo began her time at Columbia by joining Asian-interest student groups on campus during her first year, including Asian American Alliance, a political organization, and Taiko, a group that practices Japanese drumming. Over the course of the year, she helped to organize Asian American Alliance's charity performance showcase cultureSHOCK, as well as Taiko's Fall Festival. After her first year, Guo shifted her focus away from student clubs and toward her Asian-interest sorority, Kappa Phi Lambda, where she said "most of [her] growth occurred for the rest of [her] college career." As fundraising/philanthropy chair, she planned fundraisers for local nonprofits such as Womankind, which provides support to women experiencing domestic violence in New York City. "I really liked the intimacy that came with my sorority because it taught me that … family and community is such an integral aspect of [Asian identity]," Guo said. "Having that family-like setting of being in this sisterhood was a really comfortable and safe environment to grow in." At the same time, as cultural chair of Kappa Phi Lambda, Guo organized numerous cultural events with her co-chair, including a talk on the history of discrimination against Asian Americans. As she planned the event, Guo reached beyond the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act to cover events most Americans "don't even know about," such as the Rock Springs Massacre in 1885, during which white miners murdered at least 28 Chinese miners and injured 15. The event was organized in contribution to the 2021 Stop Asian Hate movement, which responded to anti-Asian discrimination and violence that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to her leadership efforts on campus, one of Guo's favorite experiences with her sorority was working with local businesses and bakeries in Chinatown and traveling downtown to speak to the business owners in Chinese as she ordered egg tarts and other goods for sorority events. "A lot of my sorority sisters actually grew up in Chinatown, so it was cool to see how they knew [the business owners]," Guo explained. "These were like their aunties and uncles." Reflecting on her evolving understanding of her cultural identity and heritage throughout college, Guo described how she used to view Asian American identity "in terms of tropes." During her first year, for example, she became fascinated with the phenomenon popularly known within the Asian American community as "ABGs," or "Asian Baby Girls"—a description of young Asian American women who attend raves and parties, drink lots of boba, and possess a fashion style that typically includes tattoos, hoop earrings, and long eyelash extensions. In light of this stereotype, Guo said she viewed Asian identity through a fairly reductive, binary lens, referring to it as "the repressed Asian kid versus the ABG." However, she said she gradually began to understand that "these are very shallow labels." "I became more interested in storytelling," Guo said regarding her changing mindset about Asian identity. "Individual narratives, one person's family history … I think more recently, I've become curious about that, especially when it comes to intergenerational trauma and mental health." Though she is majoring in computer science and minoring in math, Guo also took many other classes related to East Asian studies, including Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia, Asian American Literature and Culture, one semester each of Japanese and Korean language classes, and a class on modern Vietnamese history. Guo said these classes helped her to broaden her perspective on the Asian American experience, especially as she took them with a friend whose first-generation Chinese-Vietnamese background contrasts with her own second-generation Chinese background. "We were able to talk about the differences in our family upbringings a lot, both through my sorority and when we were taking [a Vietnamese history class] together," Guo said. "It just made me realize how different a lot of Asian American diaspora upbringings can be." After graduation, Guo will be working in software engineering at Flatiron Health, a company that she feels is "really aligned with [her] values" in its mission to build software that helps doctors manage health data for patients with cancer and find potential treatments. However, she hopes to stay engaged with the Chinese American community in New York City through, for example, her church and by volunteering in Chinatown, among other activities. Ultimately, Guo appreciates the nuance she developed in her understanding of diversity within the Asian American community at Columbia. "My time at Columbia allowed me to see in depth the experiences of other cultures that are not my own, but still Asian. … I just think it's really cool how many different experiences there are all within Asian Americanness," Guo said. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.