Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Stacey Anne Baterina Salinas and am a Ph.D. history student attending the University of California, Davis. My research centers on Asian American women’s history. I particularly am interested in intergenerational experiences and their contributions to history and American culture. As a second generation Asian American woman growing up in the Bay Area during the nineties, I noticed my generation didn’t have Asian American female role models or historical figures visible in mainstream American textbooks and curriculum. I hope to produce readable historical material that showcases Asian Americans, or minorities for that matter, as active, present, and influential so that younger generations of Asian Americans have a history to fall back on, reference, and find role models in.
How long have you been writing for?
I believe professionally, I have been writing history for five years. If we count how long I have been writing as a hobby I would probably say since I was six years old.
What is your writing process like?
My writing process really is to first read secondary sources. For example grabbing history books off the shelves written by both trained historians, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies scholars. I tend to write down topics of interest to me from those resources and begin to write summaries or annotated bibliographies on those resources. Through this process, I have made a grand collection of important scholarly material readily available to me as a reference that can help guide me through defining subject material for my own research.
The other more fun process is simply reading historical fiction, the news, or even English literature and finding stories that might interest me that way. I jot down notes in a journal or Google Document for safe keeping as to the topics I want to write on from interests I find from these less conventional resources. When I am ready, I return to those topics, sit down, write, and basically “word vomit” as much as I can because I know that proofreading is an inevitable painstaking process I have to commit to later on. Therefore getting all my ideas and notes down without worrying about the way it sounds helps ease the anxiety that comes with professional writing.
Do you have a writing routine? If so, what’s a typical day like for you?
As a Ph.D. student, it really is hard to maintain a writing routine. If we aren’t reading for research, we are writing furious notes for our own seminar papers, or we are working as Teacher’s Assistants or writing papers/articles with deadlines. I feel as if on a whole, my daily routine is really reading and writing for 8 to 10 hours. The nature of graduate school really forces you to be on top of reading and writing, not just for your classes but towards the research you hope to produce. My writing routine therefore is, whenever I can squeeze in writing, I try to write a page or two a day, that way by the end of the week I would have at least 8 pages of a rough draft ready. Procrastination is a scary habit, and this routine helps me to avoid that.
What motivates you to write?
What motivates me to write include my family and friends who believe in my scholarly aims, my own family’s fascinating and complicated ethnic history, and teaching young students. As a second generation Asian American woman, I am exposed to two very different cultures and always found those two worlds of identity both fascinating and complicated. Especially as a woman of color, I believe marginalized communities have less of a voice, if any, in traditional histories taught in both public and private school curriculum. Thus I really strive to write narratives of minorities who have been made to feel less important, or even secondary because traditional histories, news, and even film often lack variety and speak to only the majority perspective. But really overall, I love reading and how the written word can transport you to other worlds, times, or places. Stories, if written well and with heart, can make more visible the perspectives of other people from both the past and present. I want to create literature that can serve as a necessary medium that teaches empathy and compassion.
What was the first thing you did when you found out your book was being published?
I was, and still am, so grateful to Pacific Atrocities Education head and editor, Jenny Chan, and those I had collaborated with (Klytie Xu, guerrilla veteran Lourdes Poblete) to make that dream possible. I think the first thing I did besides tell my immediate family was to write in my journal that I had fulfilled a lifelong dream. I wanted to document it and write down all my emotions and essentially scrapbook that moment so that when I was older, I could still feel how happy I was because my writing would still pour those emotions out. Also, the historian in me finds documentation as evidence of the lived experience and I’m sure a part of that professional training made me want to jot it down. Of course, after I received the news, I celebrated with a trip to the coffee/boba cafe with my older sister to get myself the chubbiest cup of milk tea I felt I deserved.
Are you currently working on anything new?
As a second-year graduate student, I am working on a paper discussing the roles of Asian American women during the Yellow Power/Asian American Movement (1968-1970s). I am trying to tease out the barriers that Asian American women faced as women of color during both the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement. They weren’t allowed to fully participate in both because gender and racial prejudices, unfortunately, plagued both movements respectively. I also have in mind writing historical fiction stories that reflect the personal struggles that my family, friends, and peers have faced as women of color with long immigrant family histories.
If you weren’t a writer, what would your career be?
I would be a Humanities teacher (History, Language Composition, English Literature). I have teaching experience and always feel safe and energetic in the classroom. As a history graduate student, we are allowed the opportunities to lead classroom discussions with undergraduates as Teacher’s Assistants and I have found working with youth as a mentor to be very fun, rewarding, and another way to understand history by seeing how younger generations interpret the past.
What is the easiest part of writing for you? What is the hardest part?
The easiest part of writing for me is the outline, formulating and making arguments/narratives, finding primary resources, and creating resource guides like the bibliography or footnotes. The hardest part is getting the time to sit down, relax, and actually write a full introduction especially if there is a deadline looming over you. The introductions are still to this day very nerve-wracking.
What’s one thing you learned through writing that you wish you knew before you started?
Honestly that you won’t know how to do it until you go through it. Always be open to constructive criticism and recognize that writing is a continuous process; you’re always learning how to improve.
What is your favorite book or genre? Is there a special book that made you realize you wanted to write?
That is really a tough question. I would feel terribly ungrateful if I only mentioned one. If I had to narrow it down it would have to include genres like Children’s Literature, Fiction, History, and Asian American Studies.
- Corduroy by Don Freeman.
- Asian American Women & Men: Labor, Laws, & Love by Yen Le Espiritu
- Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America by Mary Paik Lee
- On Gold Mountain by Lisa See
- Anne of Green Gables by M. Montgomery
My favorite Authors:
1. Yen Le Espiritu 2. Susan Johnson 3. A. Milne 4. Huping Ling
5. Yoshiko Uchida
