Standing five feet tall and weighing a mere 95 pounds, Gin Yong Pang has made giant contributions to the education of Asian immigrant women.

Pang, who holds a Master’s and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, is currently a lecturer of Asian-American Studies at Stanford. However, teaching was never more meaningful for her than during her New Voices fellowship with Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland, California from July 2000-July 2002.

AIWA [pronounced AY-wah] uses a combination of education and leadership training to empower limited English speaking Asian immigrant women. These women typically work long hours for low pay and little job security in the Bay Area’s garment, hotel and electronics industries, often in sweatshop-like conditions. During her fellowship, Pang drew from her education background to create a leadership training curriculum for these women, primarily Chinese and Korean.

“When I started working with AIWA, I really felt a personal tie to it,” said Pang, who was born in South Korea and raised in the United States after age 8. “I could identify with their struggles with the language and the culture and their desire for economic stability. It reflects my own family’s experience.”

Pang created a curriculum through which these women learned about organizing, network-building, advocacy, workplace literacy and a host of other issues affecting Asian immigrant working conditions. AIWA, which has conducted leadership training programs since 1983, translated Pang’s curriculum into Chinese and Korean, allowing hundreds of women to learn from it.

“[The curriculum materials contained] some history, but also some contemporary examples of workers addressing issues of social justice and fighting for fair working conditions,” said Pang. AIWA not only advocated for higher wages and better working conditions, she added, “but also trained the women to be leaders and to find their own voices. Ultimately, we wanted them to advocate for themselves.”

One essential component of Pang’s training curriculum explores the history of Asian American immigrants, underscoring the point that Asians were initially viewed as a source of cheap labor. Pang personalized the subject further for AIWA members, highlighting the roles played by Asian immigrant women in the labor market. She also fostered a spirit of racial unity in her trainings by linking immigration to Native American, African American, and Latino histories of oppression in the United States.

Pang, who encourages her students at Stanford to protest if they feel passionately about a cause, said some of the points she raised in her trainings – particularly that vestiges of immigration’s legacy of racism and injustice still linger today – angered the women.

“I told them, ‘You should be angry! Now let’s do something about it,” Pang recalled, citing a particularly fiery appeal to the women to assert their workplace rights. She added, “I’m an immigrant myself. Empowerment for Asian women is something I feel very strongly about.”

Although her fellowship came many years later, Pang’s connection to AIWA actually began in 1984. It was then, as an undergraduate at Berkeley, that she began volunteering there, teaching English to garment workers. Along the way, Pang impressed AIWA executive director Young Shin with her commitment to the cause of Asian immigrant women. Shin never forgot.

Today, Shin credits Pang with “institutionalizing” AIWA’s leadership development curriculum.
“It’s classic material,” Shin said of Pang’s curriculum, which AIWA continues to utilize. “Other groups that work with immigrant populations are still interested in using it.”

In early 2000, Pang had just earned her Ph.D. when Shin called to share her idea of creating a leadership training curriculum for Asian women workers. Shin persuaded Pang, who had already begun applying for tenure-track teaching positions at Bay Area universities, to apply for the New Voices fellowship. A longtime admirer of Shin, Pang agreed to put her teaching career on hold and return to AIWA if her fellowship was approved. It was.

“[The New Voices fellowship] was a different path from what I envisioned myself taking, but it was a wonderful detour because it complemented what I wanted to do,” said Pang, who called her fellowship a labor of love. “The academic stuff is theoretical, but this was practical. It was a chance to practice what I’ve been preaching and make it real for people in the real world.”