Emma Gee
Emma Gee was an American activist, scholar and writer, best known for helping to coin the term "Asian American" and co-founding the Asian American Political Alliance with her husband, Yuji Ichioka.
After establishing the first-ever AAPA chapter in Berkeley, California, Gee was influential in guiding the organization through social advocacy, notably by supporting the Third World Liberation Strikes of 1968 and helping to extend AAPA beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. Gee is widely credited with collaborating with fellow AAPA activists, including Vicci Wong, Lilian Fabros, and Penny Nakatsu, to ensure that women activists held leadership roles as part of the organization's broader goal of inclusivity.
Gee later entered academia as a lecturer at UC Berkeley and UCLA, where she taught some of the first Asian American studies courses at both institutions, including the first-ever course focused on Asian women. She is also known for her writing efforts, notably editing and contributing to Asian Women and Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, the latter in collaboration with the Pacific Asian American Women Writers West.
Personal Life
By 1963, Gee was a student at Columbia University, where she met Yuji Ichioka, a graduate student pursuing a master's degree in Chinese history. Gee would later recall that the two of them first met at a shared lecture, where she referred to him as a “good-looking guy” who “had this look of disdain” as a renowned professor was delivering a lecture in a full hall. She replied that she decided on the spot, “I’ve got to meet this guy.”Due to her Yuji Ichioka's dissatisfaction with the academic program at Columbia University, and while the exact dates are unclear, Emma Gee and Ichioka relocated to the University of California, Berkeley by 1968, where they completed their graduate studies. Gee and Ichioka's date of marriage is unclear from public records, but from Ichioka's 2002 eulogy in the Los Angeles Times, it was reported that the couple had been married for over 25 years, indicating they wed by the late 1970s.
Colleagues remembered Gee as “a powerhouse in her own right” and contributed significantly to scholarship and activism. According to colleagues, she has also had a uniquely noticeable impact on numerous issues that affect women, immigrants, workers, and communities of color.
Activism
Originating the term "Asian American"
While completing their PhD programs at the University of California, Berkeley in May 1968, Gee and Ichioka established the Asian American Political Alliance in Berkeley, California. Upon the founding of AAPA, the two formulated the term "Asian American," resulting in its first known written use. Gee and Ichioka would later specify that the term "Asian American" and AAPA itself were intended to provide cohesion and consolidation between "'all of us Americans of Asian descent'" during the intersectional civil rights movements of the 1960s, not dissimilar from the origin of the terms African-American or Latin American. The term Asian American replaced the previously used term "Oriental," which had a discriminatory history as a derogatory and archaic label often used to denigrate immigrants and ethnic-descendants of the eastern hemisphere in contrast to the western hemisphere with the term "Occidental." A common consensus which emerged around the new term was its emphasis on marginalized Asian-descent communities' shared histories and identities through labor and social integration struggles as "Americans," and not as perceived "foreigners," an umbrella label bearing ample stigma.Role in the emergence of AAPA
As a result of the desire for unity expressed by Gee and Ichioka's new term of "Asian American," AAPA was credited as one of the earliest recorded Asian American pan-ethnic alliances, bringing together Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Filipino American students among others. While developing its structure and logistics, the pair drew influence from simultaneous social movements including the anti-Vietnam War movement, the UFW unionization, the Black Power Movement, and the American Indian Movement.Prior to AAPA's formation, Gee and Ichioka had circulated petitions to support the Peace and Freedom Party in 1967 as part of the anti-Vietnam War student movements across the nation. However, the couple had observed that many PFP student activists of Asian descent were participating on an individual basis, and not as a collective front, in contrast to other ethnic coalitions such as the Black Panther Party which were experiencing higher volumes of visibility. Seeing an opening to establish their own PFP-aligned caucus due to their shared feelings of marginalization from both leadership and participation in simultaneous social movements, Gee and Ichioka presented AAPA as the consolidated front of Asian American mobilization which they felt deprived of in the PFP.
Gee and Ichioka's triplex apartment at 2005 Hearst Avenue residence in Berkeley was the site of the first AAPA meeting in May 1968, which contained six credited founding members in attendance. In addition to Gee and Ichioka, there was Richard Aoki, a militant activist with the BPP and a fellow graduate colleague of Ichioka's; Floyd Huen, president of the Chinese Student Club at UC Berkeley; Victor Ichioka, Yuji Ichioka's younger brother; and Vicci Wong, a UC Berkeley undergraduate organizer with the SNCC and UFW in Salinas. Wong would later recall that some of AAPA's early participants and members, including herself, were individually contacted by Gee and Ichioka based on their traditionally-Asian surnames from local student rosters at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, as well as PFP petitions which had been circulated by the pair.
AAPA's early foundations under its six founding members included expanding its operations into San Francisco, with AAPA establishing resource centers such as the Chinese Draft Counseling Center in the city's Chinatown neighborhood, which provided Chinese-language materials for resisting the army draft during the Vietnam War. AAPA's second notable chapter formed at SF State in September 1968 from the work of Penny Nakatsu and Masayo Suzuki, the former of whom was present at the Gee-Ichioka residence soon after the early meetings to observe the potential of the organization, and who took considerable influence from Gee. As 1969 approached, AAPA chapters began spreading to Mills College, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and even as far as the University of Southern California, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and the University of British Columbia.
After the formation of AAPA, Gee, alongside fellow members including Wong and Nakatsu, took on prominent leading roles as liaisons between chapters and community connections; and it is estimated that women made up nearly forty percent of AAPA's early membership, a notable difference compared to other social organizations of the time. In addition, many male members additionally viewed Gee and her peers as "strong women," even though questions were raised about the gendered dynamics conveyed in such a distinction that would distinguish women in AAPA from male members. A key example of these gendered double-standards that Gee in particular faced in AAPA's early months came from perceptions of her role in the group by one of her fellow founders, Richard Aoki. Aoki reportedly saw Gee as a "gracious host," but did not directly acknowledge her role alongside Ichioka as a co-founder of the group who had known and worked with Ichioka, Aoki's friend and fellow graduate student, earlier than Aoki himself had.
When Gee and Ichioka relocated to New York in August 1968, Wong took over a large part of the Berkeley AAPA chapter operations in place of the couple. AAPA's reach at this point had grown far beyond the initial chapter in Berkeley under Gee and Ichioka, with Wong receiving calls and communications from scholars and community members across the United States and even from the Asian continent itself, and even receiving a visit from a Dartmouth professor who co-opted the AAPA program into a chapter back in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Influence on the Asian American Movement (AAM)
As AAPA gained ground, the founding members including Gee played critical roles in helping kickstart the Third World Liberation Front, which was a significant catalyst behind the 1968-1969 Third World Strikes at SFSU and later UC Berkeley that ultimately succeeded in establishing the first ever Ethnic Studies and Asian Studies centers at an American public university. The TWLF coalition consisted of a collaboration between AAPA, the Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor, the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, and Black, Latinx, and Native American student unions. After the success of the strikes, the Berkeley AAPA chapter began to struggle with membership retention, and sought to redirect their efforts towards strengthening Asian American Studies and community project works, with the San Francisco chapter following suit. Without the TWLF and the strikes as a guiding motive and with changes in AAPA leadership, the organization's campus chapters across the United States declined in scale by 1970.AAPA, while short-lived as an organization, caused the emergence of the Asian-American Movement by the fall of 1968. Gee had relocated to New York by the end of the summer of 1968 before the AAPA foundations grew into the AAM, but her influence on the latter movement remained apparent after AAPA's 1970 disbanding. Gee and Ichioka's initial usage of the term "Asian American" was to combat racism and imperialism facing communities of Asian descent living in the United States by proliferating an umbrella term to connect a diverse array of individuals and diasporas. After AAPA and as the later twentieth century ensued, the term became used more as a racial categorization than as a political coalition term that it was originally perceived as. However, within discourses related to social movements, the term "Asian American" has maintained its connection to civil rights and grassroots activism, in a similar sense to Gee and Ichioka's original term definition.
Gee's domestic partnership and later marriage to Ichioka was seen by many as an example of an barrier-breaking pan-Asian union pushing against traditional segregation of Asian ethnic groups, with Gee being of Chinese descent and Ichioka of Japanese descent. As the couple recruited for AAPA, their relationship to each other and later other initial AAPA participants including Lilian Fabros, Vicci Wong, and Richard Aoki further emphasized the initial AAPA goal of pan-Asian ethnic unity, particularly with Gee and Ichioka's emphasis on inclusive recruitment methods.