How Change Happens: Stories & Insights from Social Justice Changemakers

On Moving Forward with the World We Want To Live In — with Miko Lee

• Create Knowledge • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this episode I reconnect with my friend and colleague Miko Lee (she/her) — an activist, storyteller, educator, and Director of Programs at Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality. Miko and I roam through a conversation about ancestry and intergenerational patterns; transformative justice, personal responsibility, and self-care; how the U.S. government is disappearing Bhutanese American Refugees; the power of story and the danger of stories going "MIH (missing in history)"; plus some creative ways she and her collaborators are experimenting with cultivating intergenerational connections.

You'll hear the stories behind the gorgeous embroidered artworks Miko shared to illustrate how she believes change happens (view images of them here!). And you'll learn about Miko's "change lineage": past and present movement leaders who energize her, and how her parents' civil rights era activism and ethos continue to inspire her own.

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Kai:

Welcome to How Change Happens, a podcast about social change, the messiness of praxis and what emerges when our theories meet our day-to-day lives. I'm your host, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, learning and change strategist, facilitator, and coach — and founder of Create Knowledge, a consulting practice that helps change agents lead with their strengths.

Kai:

Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with my friend and long time at this point colleague, Miko Lee. Miko Lee is an activist storyteller and educator and believes in the power of story to amplify voices. She currently serves as director of programs for Asian Americans, for civil rights and equality, where she leads narrative strategy and healing justice work. She is also the lead producer of Apex Express on KPFA Radio, a show focused around Asian American and Pacific Islander activists and artists. Miko's career has been rooted in the nonprofit world, first as a theater actor, director and writer, and then as an artistic director and arts education leader. She was the executive director of Youth in Arts for over a . decade And and prior to was the director of arts and public education at East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. She served on California's Special Education and Arts Working Group, Create, California's california's Public Will Committee, Committee and the Teaching Artist Guild's National Advisory —, which is where we initially !. Finally, Miko miko is an alumni of Arts , BIPOC bipoc, a national initiative that provides tools, resources, resources and training at the intersection of art and activism, and her extensive background in theater includes working on productions at Berkeley, Seattle seattle and South Coast Rep, New new York's Public Theater, Mark mark Taper Forum, Forum and many others. Welcome, Miko!, I'm super excited to chat with you !. How are you?

Miko:

I'm okay. I'm happy to chat with you too. I'm sitting in my little house in Berkeley where next door there's a park with kids are screaming and playing in summer programming, so if you hear extra excited sounds, that's what that is.

Kai:

I love it. It's a good soundtrack. Real life.

Miko:

Sometimes! Not first thing in the morning for theater people like me that still would rather stay up all night and not work first thing in the morning.

Kai:

That's true, actually, when I worked as a teaching artist way back when, I lived across from a school and I remember being woken up by the playground.

Miko:

So loud.

Kai:

I'm kicking off every episode by inviting folks to share something that symbolizes how they believe change happens, or something about how they believe change happens. It could be an object, it could be... last episode it was a poem. But I just wanted to kick things off by hearing you... You can sort of hold it up for me and then we can describe what it is and talk a little bit about what it is and why you were inspired to bring it today.

Miko:

Okay, so I make something every day, even though I'm a theater person, which I would like... Sometimes I just do Shakespeare monologues in my car when I'm by myself. I love Shakespeare so much, it's so dorky of me! But actually I like to create something with my hands every day, and so I brought one of the things that I started during the pandemic.

Miko:

This is a silk image of my grandma. It's an embroidered black and white silk. And I created this because, to be real, during the pandemic I was on it because... the beginning of many, many Zoom calls. Now it's like all day, every day, but the beginning of it... And anytime I wasn't presenting, I had a really hard time focusing and during the pandemic I started so much thinking about my ancestors and where they came from and what are their stories and what got them to this place. And so I just found this old picture of my grandma and I traced it and I had silk laying around because I got stuff — hoarder — and I just started tracing and then embroidering her picture. And then it started from there. And then during the pandemic I did like 40.

Miko:

So, I know you said, bring one... I'm going to show you... This is another one that is my mom's family. My mom is little in there...

Kai:

Can I pause you real quick and just describe what I'm seeing?

Miko:

Sure, please!

Kai:

And folks will have a photo of this on the podcast website so folks can see it as well. But so it's sheer... It's a sheer white silk with a black border hanging from a wood sort of frame along the top, and then the embroidery is done in sort of thin black lines.

Miko:

That's right.

Kai:

I can see you through it and I can see through, like, to your window in the back, through it.

Miko:

And just to be clear, each of them are put on an antique laundromat hanger, a vintage hanger, because my mom actually grew up in a hand laundry. I'm a classic fifth generation Chinese story. So I happened to find all these antique hangers. So to me that's also part of this whole story. Is these hangers? Okay, I'll just show you one more just to get a sense. This is my mom and dad's wedding. Again it's the same concept, on an old hanger...

Kai:

These are gorgeous, Miko!

Miko:

Thank you! So anyways, I started doing this. I now have so many that are on both my family and my family story. So how's this related to change? This was me trying to keep focused, me trying to connect in some way with my ancestors and do that through a different form of storytelling. So when I did the first set, my grandma, the first one I showed you was the first one I did. And then I did one of the ancestor that first came to the United States in 18... I think it's 1845. And I took the picture that was on his arrival certificate, which I have a copy of, and that one it has his name and it says... it says "Wing Lee and it says his age, which is 35. And then it says, "three prominent scars on his cheek and his name is... the translation of his name is "First Dragon. And so I started then doing all these different ancestors. And to me there's something about this symbolism of the first dragon, the first one to come to Gam Saan, the Gold Mountain, to kind of stake the claim from a land of poverty. And these three scars on the right cheek really just intrigued me... in story. Like, where did those come from? They were prominent enough to be written down in his description. So I know nothing about him aside from that, and I just... I grew up with my grandparents, my grandma that I just showed you, telling me the story of Monkey King. And for many years, in my early theater years, I would do storytelling. Actually do it as a job! Perform storytelling, to make money, to live as an artist. And I love telling all these Monkey King stories, who is a trickster hero in our culture. And, in fact, my oldest daughter was a personality, meaning like an actor at Children's Fairyland for a season where she played the Monkey King and every weekend... she was on one weekend a month for the entire weekend, doing like 10 shows in a weekend. Like a kid advanced repertory theater! And I would have to put the makeup on her, and the makeup of Monkey King traditionally is a white face with three red stripes across the cheek. So there's some kind of interconnectivity, this symbolism that change does happen. It happens internally mostly, and it is, for me, so much about recognition of... I think, as I'm getting older, it's recognition of these patterns, these things that carry on, this sort of... Both the intergenerational trauma, but also the intergenerational joy and resilience and persistence. And now that we're living in these times where things are so hard and truly, so fucked up, I keep thinking about that.

Miko:

My therapist introduced me to this Ancestral Mathematics. Do you know about this?

Kai:

No, please tell me!

Miko:

And I'm like what is this that you speak of? And I guess there's this theory that if you look at what it takes for you to be here, for you and me to be in this conversation right now, it takes over 4,444 people to get you in this place. And there's a lovely little chart if you look up ancestral mathematics, where they like, piece it down how those people connect. And I look at that and I think I... It's my duty to be a changemaker, to be an artist, to be a storyteller. It's all these over 4,000 people that helped to support me up. That is my legacy. That means I need to be making a difference, because all these people are with me in spirit and have led me to the place where I am now.

Kai:

That's beautiful. We can put the link to that in the show notes, because I'm going to go check it out after. I'm so curious.

Miko:

And I'm sure it's more than that. I actually have a book in my family — many Chinese families have this — called a Red Book. And we have one from one side of my family, the Fah Yuen Association, and it goes back 5,000 years. So again, I look at that too and I think, okay, these are the pieces. I actually have an embroidery I did of the cover of the Red Book, because it says the cover in Chinese, which I can't read, so has been translated for me. But it says, "from the Flower Fruit Mountain to the future. So I think about this First Dragon from the Flower Fruit Mountain, and it is my duty to carry on that legacy.

Kai:

Part of what you're describing is also making me think... Maybe it was, like, talking about kind of the patterns and the movement forward... And I'm thinking about the idea of, like, iterating, right?

Miko:

Yeah.

Kai:

And there's a quote I love... It's a poet, Frank Bidart, and he wrote I think it was a poem "Borges and I where he writes in it something like: "we fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and we ourselves are changed, like this idea of kind of... And I think about that a lot... Of, like, forms like language or the way we kind of think and act in the forms we're given. You know that we learn, but as we do that, we move, we iterate them and we move them forward...

Miko:

Wait, say that poem one more time!

Kai:

Something like: "we fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them, we change them, and we ourselves are changed

Miko:

In Kanaka... You know, so many um Polynesian cultures there's like the Tapa cloth, where you start with... somebody has a pattern. And then they show that pattern to the next generation. And then they cover up the pattern, and the next generation creates their pattern. So each part of the Tapa cloth changes in each generation, which I think is quite lovely. It's like you're taking the lesson that you learned from one and then moving it, but it's the next generation to interpret it the way they want to see it.

Kai:

Yeah, I love that too, the balance in that of looking to what came before but not holding so tightly to it that it can't become something else.

Miko:

And I feel like, in the time of now, our crazy upside down world, we're just not looking to the past collectively. We're not looking to what has happened, like the atrocities that have happened in our world, and it's like we are just... Yeah, this ignorance walking into the world where it's just impacting so many millions and millions of people in hurtful ways.

Kai:

Yeah... I'm curious. You talked about story and connection — and relationship, I heard — in your sort of object-based theory of how change happens. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about how this kind of leads into your work in narrative change — and sort of how you approach that.

Kai:

But before we do, there was an interesting piece of feedback on the first episode. Someone who had listened to it said they had to do some thinking about what change was — like, what people meant when they were talking about change. So I actually want to pose that question to you before we get too in the weeds of like... When we're talking about change... I feel like we just ran with it, but what are you thinking of?

Miko:

Somehow I got the impression when I first read your email that, oh, this has to be inspirational or I have to come up with change as like a hope and a growth. But that was just my interpretation and I think because we're in such complicated times right now, it's hard for me to think of an inspirational thing. To be real, I'm involved in multiple ongoing social justice issues that just make... It just feels like I need to do the best I can just to take care of myself to get through to the next day. Because in my work I'm holding a lot, a lot of people.

Miko:

And so to me, change is, I think, movement. So I did think of it in social justice terminology. And I keep going back to change as I'm looking at like the big picture change. I think I do a lot of work in transformative justice and I think so much of it has to start with personal change, personal growth, personal responsibility and reliability. And as much as I talk about self-care, I'm horrible at !, Just just to be real. I work crazy hours. I could talk about it all you want, but honestly, I'm up working late at night, I'm for first thing in the morning for East Coast time. I think it's shifting. It's around shifting and movement and change is, about moving forward with the world that we want to live in.

Kai:

I love that... moving forward with the world we want to live in.

Miko:

And that's hard.

Kai:

Yeah.

Miko:

Right now that's really hard.

Kai:

Yeah... agreed. Thank you for that little sidestep. So I want to pull us back through... So we were talking about story and relationship and ancestry, and I'd love to hear a little bit about how that shows up in your work.

Miko:

I'm pausing, I'm really thinking... it shows up in so many different ways. It shows up in every single meeting I have when I'm having conversations with people. In the big picture it shows up... We have done a deep dive at my work in looking at the perception of how Asian Americans are seen in the broader United States and coming up with a narrative arc for representing the multiplicity, the plurality of our communities. And what does that mean and how do we share those stories.

Kai:

I think maybe it's a... And this might be a bigger question, but... Why narrative?

Miko:

Here's the thing, even though I said that number about 4,000, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ancestors, and that mathematics... And people love the numbers, they love saying, "oh, this many people have been impacted by this. We need the both. We don't need just the data with the numbers, but we need the stories to bring it alive.

Miko:

So even though I've talked about my 4,000-something ancestors, it is the story of my great-great-grandfather that came from an impoverished area in China to California to work in the gold mines and work on the railroads and wondering about that scar and making up stories about that scar that happened. Or the first image I showed you of my grandma, who you know, raised nine kids in Madera in a laundromat and gave birth to my Auntie on the kitchen table during the time that my mom and her siblings went... She served them breakfast in the morning. They all went to school in Madera. They came back for lunch, and by lunch they had a brand new sister. She had made breakfast, literally given birth on the kitchen table, my grandpa did the birth, then cleaned up, made them lunch in that amount of time, and came back and they ate the food. So talk about resilience... I'm like I cannot be a whiny baby about too many meetings if my grandma could do that!

Miko:

But I think about. Even right now... I'm working on... One of our groups that I work with... I work in a network of 11 different progressive Asian American groups, one of whom is Asian Refugees United. And they are around using art and healing for displaced peoples, and one of their big populations is Bhutanese refugee Americans.

Miko:

And since March now we know over 72 Bhutanese refugees have been disappeared, arrested... and detained and or disappeared, which is why they left Bhutan, went to live in a refugee camp in Nepal after Mohan civil war and then were accepted as legal refugees into the United States in the early 2000s. And now anybody who has had any slight interaction with the law and I'm talking about even like picked up for something as innocuous as a traffic accident or a childhood, you know something they did when they were a kid any kind of interaction with the law, even if they've served their sentence is being picked up and disappeared. They have been sent into other countries. They initially are sent back to Bhutan, but Bhutan expelled them in the first place. Then now some of them are in Nepal at a refugee camp. Last week the Nepalese government said we don't want them. They're not our people either. They are stateless people. A lot of them are disappeared. We don't know where.

Miko:

So while I could say to you, oh, this number, 72 people deported... I could tell you the story of the person I was talking with yesterday, and that is Tika and Tika's husband Mohan, who right now is incarcerated in Michigan, even though he was arrested in Ohio. They're also moving them from state to state just to evade having any kind of good legal procedures, because every state is totally different. And so I was talking with Tika about sharing her story about her husband. She's now, instead of going to the hospital while she was in labor with their brand new baby, she went to go and talk to her husband who was deported to another detention center ... to try and find him and talk to him and figure out what was going on.

Miko:

So hearing about Tika and Mohan's story, their family, where he was like a devoted husband, a son who was taking care of his ailing parents, you know, an amazing community member here has suddenly been swept up. He was asked to go to an ICE hearing just to do a regular check-in and they debated should go? And they, as a family, said oh yeah, we're going to follow the law. We should go just to make sure. They went. Immediately... This is something that happened when he was a kid. As a teenager, an incident happened. So having a person, a name, a face, a story. Tika is now essentially a single mom raising a... She has a four-month-old, a baby. She just gave birth to this baby. Her husband's incarcerated. Luckily, right now this judge has held on and has not had him deported and we're hopefully trying to find a lawyer tomorrow to be able to take this case on and trying to throw out his old teenage conviction.

Miko:

But having a person, a person to be able to shed light on a story I think is really important. So for me, having a link to something bigger to understand what's going on. And I also think, like, movement wise, that's why we look at these people, like, for me Grace Lee Boggs, or Dolores Huerta, or Malcom X, or for some people, Martin Luther King Jr, right? We have these people that we look to, that they can be beacons of hope for us and I feel like in the time of now, there's a few that are coming out. You know we have AOC, we have, you know the new hopefully new New York mayor coming out. We have, like Michelle Wu, we have these few people that are coming out. But in the time of so much oppression, so much white supremacy and capitalism, it's hard to look for the saviors and heroes and we need to be lifting up these stories of people so that we could get more people stepping forward.

Kai:

I feel like I need a moment because maybe it's a testament to like the power of story... But as you were sharing the story, I could feel my body getting tense and I could feel the anger and I could feel the fear and the just, like, it was a visceral response, right? That it's not, as you were saying... People are not just numbers.

Miko:

And also the amazing scholar Helen Zia talks about when things are MIH, missing in history. And we have all of these moments that are happening right now that are missing in history. Just these, like, we're hearing sometimes about, oh, the immigrants that are sent back to Venezuela, you know, Mexican immigrants, but we're not hearing the story of the Bhutanese refugees. Now we're starting, but I cannot tell you how many calls and how many pushes that we've made from reporters all over, and it wasn't... I mean, it was the Guardian that first started to cover it, and newspapers in India, and then finally we got a New York Times cover story about a month ago. But it took a lot of groundwork. And so, to me, lifting up an individual story to shed light on a broader issue that's happening is one of the ways that we can make change happen.

Kai:

That's really powerful.

Miko:

And that's what I was talking about earlier. I feel like so many times I'm taking in people's stories and talking with them and helping them really shape how their story can be shared, and really being with a lot of people while they cry, while they feel anger and defeat. And I will even say, you know, we have been doing all these meetings with Congress members lately to lift up the situation, and the amazing leader, co-leader of Asian Refugees United, is a Bhutanese refugee and so since this started happening at the end of March and since then we've been meeting with these Congress members and Robin Gurung is the amazing co-executive director. And he has been going to these meetings with Congress members for the first time and I feel like, man, as an American, as a fifth generation American, I need to apologize to him on behalf of America, because these meetings with Congress members are devastating. Because we do the meeting. There's an impassioned plea, we talk about what's happening, we ask for a congressional hearing, you know more information to find out why Bhutan is being targeted, why it was on the draft red list, travel ban, and even the most progressive members of Congress there's like, "oh, this is bad, oh, we feel for you. And they're not doing anything, and it's really frustrating, and so I'm thinking about how do we hold on to that. How do I support Robin as we go through this? And at the same time, I'm enraged by what's happening right now. And so it's going back to that, yes, deep breathing for me, trying to take a walk, trying to, like, as I was saying in the beginning, make something every day, like with my hands, create a piece of art to survive, to get, to try and not let all of the horrible things that are happening be overwhelming.

Kai:

Thinking about, like, in your intro, it's both story and healing justice, and there's something in both of those that is, like, really deeply intertwined with connection, right?

Miko:

Yeah.

Kai:

Healing and connection, story and connection, and just, like, how important that is to stay connected to ourselves, to stay connected to others, to stay connected to our practice.

Miko:

I was at this program director's meeting once at work and there were probably eight of us around the table and we're talking incredibly smart people doing just amazingly brilliant work. And of the eight around the table, six of them could not have conversations with their parents about politics, and it was only me and one other person that were raised in progressive families. Like, my parents marched with Dr King, and my other colleague, Dr King and Coretta stayed with his parents in New Jersey. So the two of us are on one side, but the six others were like, "yeah, I can't talk to my parents about what's going on. They're conservatives." And I started hearing this more and more in our movement spaces.

Miko:

So we're doing this experiment right now, speaking of this kind of linkage with the story and healing justice. Because of this intergenerational divide. We are with the same Bhutanese community. All the young folks are going through a transformative justice communications training.

Miko:

It's 12 sessions that we're doing with the brilliant TJ leader, Mia Mingus, and then we're coming up with a series of questions to bring up topics about politics and how we feel and how we fit in as Americans. And then, in the fall, we're going to hold these intergenerational dinners where we're inviting the elders to show how to make a traditional food — so they're an expert in something — and the younger folks are going to be talking about their views around politics, their views around how we fit in as Americans. What does that mean? As an attempt, it's an experiment to try and bridge this divide, but truly it is this... how do we hold conversations with somebody who, especially right now, might have totally different political views than us but do believe in family, in love, in eating together, in making food together? In all... you know, these connections like strengthening those sense of culture and family and love, but talking about how the broader world — the impact of the broader world — affects us.

Kai:

It's the base, right? Like, it's the thing that keeps us at the table when we disagree.

Miko:

Right, so we're experimenting with how can we do those with folks... that's not necessarily your blood, elders, but like your community of elders?

Kai:

That's amazing. It reminds me of my grandfather who, you know, died over a decade ago, but not everybody in the family could or would talk politics with him. say, He"th was, I mean, he was an older school Republican, you know, but I would. I think the connection allowed for curiosity. You know it wasn't disrespectful disagreement... Yeah, it was interesting. I don't remember the conversations as being hard. I remember us not being, you know, in the same place. There was a love that supported the willingness to kind of be in conversation about things that mattered. Because there were other ways in which we were deeply aligned and I was very much cared for by him and my grandmother. So, yeah, that you can hold those kind of angles, right? Of like... here is where we're quite close and here is where we're very far away. But like, how do I hold that tension?

Miko:

When I was growing up my dad used to always say to me, "you keep thinking in terms of black and white and good and evil." And he would always say it, :"the world. is not like that. It's so many now shades of gray in between black and white." I think about that now as I'm getting older. It's like, mmm hmmm, it's like the older I get and also as I see my young daughters that are not young, but young women that are coming of age, and how we have conversations and there is a definite thing about age and really having a broader perspective.

Kai:

Well it's interesting... You know, I think black and white can be a helpful tool in certain situations, but there's a skill in knowing where and when to wield it, you know? I'm reading Loretta Ross's book Calling In now.

Miko:

Oooh, is it good? I have that on my list.

Kai:

Yeah, and there's a passage I just got to around where she's talking about how, you know, you can be 50% aligned with someone, 75% aligned with someone, and like, is it worth fighting over the 25%? Is it worth moving forward with what you have? And something about that really resonates for me. And I always have this question and I don't have an answer for it, of like: where's the cutoff? You know, like, at what point and I don't think it's a number, because I don't think so easily in numbers in that way but like there is a moment right where it's like, actually we can't move forward together. And so it's a really interesting tension to me of like, how do we hold that kind of collective energy and willingness to work with where we agree, versus like where is the moment where maybe we do have to draw a line? I don't think there's a formula for figuring that out.

Miko:

Yeah, I mean, sadly there's not the answer like that, which would be so great!

Kai:

Maybe it's a feeling? I mean, I feel like for me in my life, at moments, it's been a feeling. It hasn't been a formula. It's been a like, I'm done!

Miko:

That's true. I do feel like, as I age, the lesson I learned over and over again is: trust my intuition. And I have to keep learning it. Sadly! I think, when you're a little kid or when you're taking your kid to the park and they're like boom, these people, these kids, just immediately connect and even as an adult, it's like, oh, I like this person, or like there's a spark or there's a something... and also the opposite, it's like, nope, this person is not for me. I think that there's that intuition that is just so real.

Kai:

I have felt that a lot around parenting. Like early on especially, there were moments where I was like... I don't know about this. And it ended badly. And I feel like one of the things I'm learning to do is trust... Like I don't even know why, but I know that this is not the right path forward. But it's hard.

Miko:

Because I said so

Kai:

Yeah, I mean that doesn't fly ever in my house but...

Kai:

So I do want to hold space for the story, your stories that you brought as well, because I know I asked you to think of a few stories. But I want to check back in just to that change lineage question. You listed off a number of folks who are inspiration. Do you feel like that kind of touches on the folks that you would think of as sort of your change lineage, people you look to from prior, or is there anyone else that you want to call out?

Miko:

When you pose that question about change lineage, I think about my parents immediately. I think about how, when I was a little kid and I wanted to eat grapes so bad. I would see other kids bring them in their lunch to school and, like I want grapes. And it was not allowed in my house because of the grape boycott that was going on in California. I kept asking my parents to get me grapes. It's so silly, because you know there's something that you covet it if you can't have it, at least for me. And my dad, finally, had had enough of me asking all these questions.

Miko:

I don't even... I must... I'm not sure how old I . was It's it's such a vivid memory, but I must have been like eight years old or something. And so my dad said I'm going to give you this bucket, this pail, and I want you to go outside. And we had this plum tree that has those teeny, tiny plums. You know, they're almost the size of cherries. And he said I want you to go out and fill this entire bucket with plums from the front yard. So I said, okay, I gotta get my grapes. And so I take my little bucket and I go out there and I worked for a day to fill that bucket. It took so much time. I would stop, do other things and come back. It took so much time. But then finally at the end of the day I bring him this full bucket of cherries and he takes it back and he looks at it and he says, okay, this one isn't good, this has a little mark on it, this one is messy, and he like gets rid of it.

Miko:

So, basically I'm left with half a bucket of these plums. And then he said actually, if you really want this, you need to fill this up again. And I said what?! And I started to complain. And then he said so I want to tell you what's happening with people that work on those grape farms.

Miko:

And so he starts talking to me about labor rights and farm workers' rights and what's going on and why he was, you know, marching with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong and why it's important for us to support other people and what that means.

Miko:

And he just basically framed it in this whole way for me to have a personal understanding of a hardship and albeit a suburban, you know, kid hardship but really to kind of frame it in a way that I could understand that there were people that were suffering and that it's not just about me, it's about a broader issue. So it's funny because that was such a kid thing, but it really stayed with me. I have this one, this clear memory of like I can do this, I can go fill this bucket right. And then this disappointment at you know, all my hard work being just like half of it being thrown out, essentially, and then this story that came with it. So for me, you know I grew up in a household with progressive parents that were marching, that my father was a radical theologian, and so I grew up on a seminary, so I was around a lot of other folks that believed that social movements can be changed through Christianity.

Miko:

In that time it was really... My father had read the book "Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton and believed... which was one of the precursors to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa... and was in that generation of 60s ministers that really felt like this is how we change society. Though I am not religious, I did not carry on that Christianity aspect and my parents never enforced us to do that. That idea of working for a greater movement, working for not just me but for the broader community, has always been imbued in who I am, and pretty much all of my siblings are like that too. Most of us tithe not in terms of to a church, 10% to a church, but I, no matter how low my salary ever was, I always give 10% of it away to progressive groups that I believe in.

Miko:

Even when I was like struggling as an actor, that was like a core part of how I was raised. So I think it created this ethos. And my girls do that now too, my 25 and 30 year old. So I think it was this ethos in how we walk through the world that helped to really embed in me how I live, how I'm able to get up every day and do the work I do.

Kai:

Yeah, you're like, "it's not out there, it's here. It starts in me, Like you were saying that earlier, that personal accountability.

Miko:

Yeah, and as connected to the 4,000 ancestors.

Kai:

Yes! Me who is possible because of... what was the exact number?

Miko:

Something in the 4,000s. I will send you a link to it. It's a lot of people, is the point.

Kai:

So my closing question for you, which is a sort of... I think of it as like a "pay it forward question, where each episode is sort of focusing on a different person that I'm chatting with, but also I want to lift up other folks that are inspiring that person. This question is sort of inspired by that ethos and I'm wondering: who or what is inspiring your change work right now?

Miko:

I will have to say I work with so many people that I deeply respect and in my network Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality, which we call ACRE, but I want to lift up the story that I was telling, which is about Asian Refugees United and Robin Gurung, and the story about what is happening with Bhutanese American refugees right now. And I will provide you with links, Kai, so folks can find out more to support this work.

Miko:

Robin was really running a youth development program that was focused on young, giving Bhutanese Americans, young folks, a sense of self through arts, through healing, through soccer, through table tennis, through afterschool mentorship, and instead got embroiled into the center of an international crisis of people who are just being disappeared and expelled. And so I have seen him rise up, standing up in a situation that was unexpected, in fact, a surprise and a shock to the community, but really, just, you know, wanting to run a soccer program but instead being in the middle of an international scandal, really! And just being so strong and learning something new every day. And learning how to talk to people and meeting with all these Congress members and hosting Know your Rights workshops and being the person, nationally from 10 different states, that people are calling, saying this is happening to my family too. So I really want to honor Robin Gurung and the work that he's doing.

Miko:

And then my colleague Aisa Villarosa, from Asian Law Caucus, is holding up the legal front, filing two different cases, one around habeas corpus and one around FOIA request, all on behalf of these folks. So... so many people are doing hard work right now. We are hearing about the struggles and it's true, the struggles are real. And the movement, the resistance is real and deep and profound and strong — and it is getting stronger.

Kai:

hank you. Hearing those stories too, right, of people who are resisting, people who are doing the work, is also important.

Miko:

Absolutely.

Kai:

In this moment... We feel less alone as we fight.

Miko:

I think often of, you know, one of my heroes Grace Lee Boggs who... she's the first one that said we are the leaders we've been waiting for. It is true, we can't just wait for the next MLK or whoever. We need to step up and take that space.

Kai:

And scene! I'm going to close it there, on that call.

Miko:

Okay, thank so much!

Kai:

Thank you so much for the conversation today, Miko. I have so many things bubbling in my head that are going to take a while to process, but it is good to connect with you and to hear what's inspiring you.

Miko:

Always, always great to talk with you, Kai.

Miko:

Thank

Miko:

Always, always great to talk with you, kai. Thank B."

Kai:

you all for listening to how Change Happens. You can find a list of the different resources and organizations and references from this episode in the show notes. If you appreciate this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend, colleague or network and or leaving a review. I'm also always happy when people reach out to share feedback with me directly. As you heard in this . episode, it can have an impact right away. I want these conversations to be both inspiring and useful to folks doing social change work, so how they're landing with you genuinely matters to me. Finally, how Change Happens is a Create Knowledge production. Thanks go out to Romain and Gael for their remix of the song T-Baba, which is the podcast theme song, and to my editor, the feminist podcast studio Softer Sounds. If you're a woman or non-binary person working on a podcast and looking for support, definitely check them out. Thanks again for listening and take care.