This initiative engages Asian diasporic designers and leaders in learning, building, and practicing intra- and inter-community solidarity. Part public memory work, part educational resource, and part working toolkit, this project looks at the Asian diaspora through the lens of transcultural space, creating connections (not equivalencies) between Asian diaspora histories and the histories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Stories centering Asian voices engaged in transracial activism are collected through oral history interviews and convenings. The gathering of stories is rooted in the belief that shared knowledge is a form of mutual aid. While it is important to amplify Asian voices, which are historically erased from our national consciousness, this project foregrounds Asian experience as inherently bound to other BIPOC communities. The freedoms that some of us have been afforded are predicated on the oppression of others. This unsettling reality structures Asian solidarity as a process of undoing and uplifting.

Tonia Sing Chi is a transdisciplinary designer, researcher, builder, and licensed architect based in Oakland on Ohlone land, where she is from. As the founder of Peripheral Office, she weaves together built environment storytelling, place-based building practices, and reciprocal, cross-cultural approaches to public art, architecture, and preservation. Chi has taught courses on design justice, reparations and the built environment, community design-build, and furniture making at University of California, Berkeley; University at Buffalo; Florida A&M University; and University of Utah. She holds an MArch and a master’s of science in historic preservation from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she received the Charles McKim Prize for Excellence in Design, the AIA Henry Adams Medal, the William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize, and the KPF Paul Katz Fellowship. Chi is a core organizer with Dark Matter U, a design-build instructor with Girls Garage, and a founding member of Nááts’íilid Initiative.