
Taiwanese American author Ellie Yang Camp has been a high school history teacher, an artist, and an anti-racist educator. Now she’s taking on another task, authoring Louder Than the Lies: Asian American Identity, Solidarity, and Self-Love. In this book she unpacks the Asian American identity by drawing on personal experiences, stories from her friends, and the history of Asians in America. She also tackles the topic of white supremacy, capitalism, and racial solidarity.
This is not a typical book about Asian Americans— it does not read like an academic text. You don’t have to open a dictionary or read three articles just to understand a word. Instead, Louder Than the Lies uses accessible language and even visual charts to explore how Asian Americans are racialized in the United States.
As a former high school history teacher, Camp knows how to get people to understand the material. “A lot of us that were raised in the United States, we were probably asking questions about what it meant to be Asian American, but there were so few resources that the questions just kind of went unanswered,” Camp tells me. This is why Louder Than the Lies is so important. “When Asian American history is erased, we are robbed of our historical identity as if we have never existed before. To be left ignorant about Asian American history is to erase who we are as a people and as a movement,” she states in her book.
Louder Than the Lies is split into three sections: The System, Living in the System, and Dismantling the System. Camp reframes U.S. history to center the experiences of Asian Americans. She writes that U.S. history is mostly told through the lens of white men; stories from the perspective of Asian Americans are often forgotten.
Camp then offers Asian Americans an alternative value system, where worthiness is not prescribed by white supremacy or capitalism, but by Asian Americans themselves. She gives a path towards liberation from these systems aimed at dividing races and pitting us against each other. There is a feeling of both discomfort and comfort in this book: discomfort through our complicity in perpetuating the system, comfort through learning to self-love and building solidarity with other people of color.
In short, Yang breaks down white supremacy, walks readers through the history of Asians in America, and provides readers with the vocabulary needed for Asian Americans to have a conversation about race. There are even discussion questions at the end of the book!
I had the opportunity to talk to Ellie Yang Camp about her book, which will be on sale starting October 22, 2024.
Wang: What was the journey for you to become an educator about Asian American issues?
Camp: I knew very early on that I was interested in teaching. I remember having a conversation with one of my high school friends where our teacher had presented some project to us, and after class I was like, you know, I think the project is good, but I think he did a bad job explaining it to us because we are not excited. And if he had done this, this and this, we would be way more excited about it. My friend said, you think about how to make our lesson plans better. And I was like, yeah, don’t you? And he’s like, absolutely not. So I thought, oh, maybe I should be a teacher.
W: Why did you decide to write Louder Than the Lies?
Camp: I found that when it got specifically to the topic of race, they would acknowledge it very briefly, and then they would almost skip over it or talk around it. And it would frustrate me because I want us to talk about it. And as an educator, there came a point where I thought this might be an educational issue. Maybe we can’t talk about it because we don’t know how to talk about it. So I really wanted to kind of write a book where we could that kind of explained what race was and what it means to be racialized in the United States.
I really wrote this for the community. I didn’t really write it for myself. I’m not somebody that’s trying to make a career out of writing books, but I was just like, we as a community in general need a book that’s easy to read that I can just give to my aunties, just to help us get on the same page, help us to have better conversations, help us to figure out what it is that we’re doing.
W: What was your process in writing this book?
Camp: I would say that the book was probably 20 years in the making. I started learning about stuff in college and then I entered the real world and I would like I’d be like, what is going on here? How come no one told me about this? Or how come nobody warned me that I would be experiencing all these weird dynamics? And so it was actually kind of a challenge because I would say most not all, but the basic bones of the book, I already had them in me. So, when it came time to write the book, I sat down and I was like, If I was going to write a book about being Asian American, it was very teacher like, what are all the questions that I should answer?
W: Why do you think self-love and empathy is so important in learning about race?
Camp: I think the thing about race and racism is we talk about it a lot in terms of political constructs. But when we talk about [the emotions of] racism or any type of -ism[…] it’s like hate. To me that’s not just a political thing. [Conversations about race] ultimately are about your morals and your ethics and who you want to be as a person […] I think empathy is just what connects us to other human beings, right? And I think when we’re at our best, we just want to feel human. We want other people to acknowledge our humanity, we want to respect other people’s humanity. The best we have to offer each other is our humanity, right?
Bing Wang (he/him) is a Taiwanese American journalist based in Chicago, IL. His main focuses are human rights, marginalized peoples, and issues regarding Asian Americans. He received a B.A. in Asian American Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. also in Asian American Studies from the University of California Los Angeles.
Ellie Yang Camp is an artist and community educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. The proud daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she has been a high-school history teacher, a full-time parent, a calligrapher, an anti-racist educator, and now an author. She has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in Education with an emphasis in Teaching of Social Studies from Stanford.
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