Hello! My birth name is Shengxiao (Chinese) and my nickname is Sole (Spanish). I am a speaker, social justice educator, storyteller, writer, and facilitator. I am currently an activist-in-residence conducting research through the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. I am a proud generation 1.5 Asian American.
I am currently an activist-in-residence at the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this capacity, I am conducting research to more deeply understand the AAPI electoral landscape in California’s 45th Congressional District.
I am the Progressive Partnerships Director at The Management Center where I manage foundation partnerships that provide capacity-building support to grassroots organizations working in social change. I am a writer for the Xin Sheng Project, a platform combating misinformation in the Chinese diaspora community by publishing in-language, progressive articles that shift perspectives and build intergenerational power. I also represent the Xin Sheng Project at the Asian American Disinformation Table, a national table that coordinates research, strategies, policy recommendations, pop culture, messaging interventions, & corporate accountability around issues of domestic & transnational misinformation and disinformation impacting Asian Americans. I have also been a fellow of the Leadership Institute at the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment.
I have spent the majority of my career working on intersectional community issues through advocacy, education, direct service, and philanthropy. In the nonprofit world, I was part of the founding team working with President Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod to start an Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago to provide students with opportunities for political and civic engagement. I worked on immigration policy advocacy through congressional visits to advocate for the renewal of proposed bills and by writing policy white papers that reached elected leaders. I also worked as a paralegal to provide direct legal services to unaccompanied and undocumented immigrant children from Central America, Asia, and Africa. I worked as the Director of Partnerships at a global health nonprofit where I delivered speeches on global health education, managed a $400K USAID grant, and oversaw 60+ partnerships with community leaders in over 20 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the philanthropy world, I worked closely with the managing director of impact investments at the MacArthur Foundation to operate a nonprofit consulting education program at the University of Chicago. I also worked as a program officer at a foundation in San Jose, Costa Rica and helped to create a program-related investment portfolio.
I have lived in Latin America and worked with grassroots community leaders in Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. As a generation 1.5 Asian American, I am also working to build community among AAPIs in order to increase our socio-political power and to uplift our lineages. I am inspired by BIPOC activists, grassroots leaders, and all the intersectional movement ancestors who have paved the way.
Combining my experiences in the social sector and my skills as a public speaker and facilitator, I created Nectar. Through Nectar, I offer political education and teach Asian American history through delivering keynotes, speaking on panels and workshops, writing articles, and more. I combine my storytelling and facilitation skills and ground my social justice education practice in abolitionist and transformative justice principles.
I live and work on Tongva and Kizh land, colonially known as Los Angeles.
I believe we all have the desire and capacity to live liberated lives, even while living under oppression. Our bodies and spirits know, deep down, that we have had to turn off a part of our humanity in order to live under oppression.
My work aims to activate us to embrace our full humanity so that we can bring more liberation into our lives now as we make our way to a more liberatory future.
Looking back on my story so far, here are some moments that stand out to me on my journey of coming more fully into my being:
At age 11, I boarded a trans-Pacific flight leaving my ancestral home in China. I landed in a predominantly white midwestern suburb in the United States knowing only 10 words of English. That flight placed my soul forever in the diaspora, leaving me always in search of words to describe feelings of nostalgia, longing, and loss.
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A year later, I was sitting in my 7th grade social studies classroom learning about the various monuments in Washington D.C.
My teacher, a cis white man, told us about the Vietnam War Memorial. He described the black granite wall etched with the names of military service members. He talked about how the granite was reflective and as you read the names, you could catch a glimpse of yourself. The design reminded us that we could, at any moment, trade places with the people whose names are on the wall, my teacher explained. They gave their lives to protect our freedom and democracy, but it could have just as easily been us who gave up our lives.
At age 13, I knew that when my teacher said “us” and “our,” he did not include me. He did not include me among the heroes of his imagination. In fact, had we lived in that era, he would have considered me wartime enemy.
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In high school, I had a small role in a school play and my dad helped out the theater program by purchasing some costume pieces. They didn’t end up fitting, but they were marked as final sale so my dad couldn’t return them. When the teacher in charge of the play found out, she said in front of the whole cast, next time, I will send someone who speaks English. That was when I decided that I was embarrassed by my parents, by my face, my lineage. I decided I didn’t want to be Chinese.
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In senior year in high school, I took advanced classes in Spanish and learned about the Dirty Wars in Argentina and Chile, the moms of Plaza de Mayo, the storyteller Isabel Allende and her invented country, the role the U.S. government played in military coups and the destruction of Latin American communities. I started to question why we didn’t learn about any of this in “world studies” class. I started to realize that “world studies” in my high school just meant the study of and glorification of European societies, with erasure of colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of empire violence.
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In college, I was a student leader in two organizations: a nonprofit consulting group and a student activist group to support the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. I read books and heard from speakers on nonprofit management, on poverty, on global development, and on philanthropy. I learned so much form all these sources, but I always had questions in the back of my mind: why did organizations need to host benefit dinners where wealthy (mostly) white people ate filet mignon in order to talk about poverty? Why did grant money flow to 10 (mostly) white management consultants and 20 subcontractors before the leftover pennies went to grassroots communities who needed to report exactly how every cent was spent? These questions would lay the ground work for my understanding of the nonprofit industrial complex.
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In college, I also studied community development and human rights. I took classes and read books that helped me to understand the underlying conditions that created humanitarian crises, how moneyed-interests converted states of emergency to protracted states of emergency, how gender and sexuality were socially and colonially constructed, what life for people who lived in poverty and social abandonment looked like, and how systems of oppression were linked. One memorable class I took was called Anthropology of Structural Violence and Social Suffering.
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One summer while in college, I worked in the Dominican Republic with an organization that hosted summer camps for children with Type I Diabetes. I learned that we had the biomedical knowledge and technology it took to manage Type I Diabetes fairly well. But many of the kids at camp had, at some point in their lives, been rushed to the ER for glucose spikes or drops due to lacking consistent access to insulin. I learned about social determinants of health. I started to understand what it meant to live in a world that doesn’t view health care as a human right, that doesn’t view the lives of disabled and chronically-ill people as having value, that is governed by the medical industrial complex with patents that valued profit over people - a theme that plays out in so many areas including during the COVID pandemic.
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At another point in college, I received a language grant to study Quechua in Peru. I lived with a Spanish-Quechua bilingual family and we discussed deep questions of culture, identity, language, indigeneity, and colonization. A year later, I returned to Peru to write about community development and women entrepreneurs for my BA thesis. I interviewed 30 women small business owners. Many of them came to trust me deeply with their stories of pain and suffering, of violence and heartache, and of healing and joy. Their stories showed me the wide gap between who they were and how “community development experts” from the outside saw them.
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In 2014, I worked at an immigrant legal aid and advocacy organization. I was part of a team that worked with unaccompanied immigrant children, which meant that a few times a week, I went to federal detention centers where the U.S. government held undocumented and unaccompanied children. I did legal rights presentations and intakes with the kids. I listened to stories of violence and poverty from many kids from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, China, and more. I came home feeling like a ghost of a person and watched news outlets talk about “the influx of children apprehended at the border” without any hint of humanity. I learned about Central American history, the devastating war on drugs, the collective pain of communities, while holding vicarious trauma, receiving almost no support from my organization, not even a living wage. That year, I connected a lot of dots between colonization, exploitation, oppression, violence, and the nonprofit industrial complex. I started to see that the small is a reflection of the large and that even in social justice spaces, we tend to replicate the oppressive, hierarchical structures we see in larger society.
That same year, Ferguson cried out Black Lives Matter and I learned from Black liberation thinkers and abolitionists and connected even more dots between structural racism, structural poverty, and colonization.
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From 2015-2018, I worked at a global health and leadership development nonprofit. I got many opportunities to travel and meet with grassroots community leaders. In Guatemala, I had long conversations with a community leader about oppression and liberation. When I asked him for an example of an oppressor, he said without hesitation “USAID,” which is the U.S. Agency for International Development. In El Salvador, I got to learn about the violence produced by the U.S. that created the conditions that drove kids to leave their homes, becoming the unaccompanied immigrant children that I had previously worked with in federal detention centers. In Thailand, the majority of communities I visited thought I was Thai or Burmese. They took me in as “one of us,” and I got the privilege to be part of many conversations where community leaders shared openly about wealthy (mostly) white donors.
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Since 2018, I began doing even deeper work to unpack my own Asian American identity. I learned so much more about Asian American history and racialization and connected even more dots in my growing understanding of systems of oppression. As I heal and learn and connect with my ancestors, I know it is an honor to be Chinese, to be Asian, to be me.
These moments and more make up my journey of coming more fully into my being. I know that my story is still being written. Our collective story is still being written.
Through my experiences of learning, hoping, loving, and healing, I firmly believe that a liberatory world is not only possible, it is inevitable.
Thank you for being here.
