The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice

The rise of the Auntie Sewing Squad, a massive mutual-aid network of volunteers who provided free masks in the wake of US government failures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
In March 2020, when the US government failed to provide personal protective gear during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Auntie Sewing Squad emerged. Founded by performance artist Kristina Wong, the mutual-aid group sewed face masks with a bold social justice mission: to protect the most vulnerable and most neglected.
 
Written and edited by Aunties themselves, The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice tells a powerful story. As the pandemic unfolded, hate crimes against Asian Americans spiked. In this climate of fear and despair, a team of mostly Asian American women using the familial label "Auntie" formed online, gathered momentum, and sewed masks at home by the thousands. The Aunties nimbly made and funneled masks to asylum seekers, Indigenous communities, incarcerated people, farmworkers, and others disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. When anti-lockdown agitators descended on state capitals—and, eventually, the US Capitol—the Aunties dug in. And as the nation erupted in rebellion over police violence against Black people, the Aunties supported and supplied Black Lives Matter protesters and organizations serving Black communities. Providing hundreds of thousands of homemade masks met an urgent public health need and expressed solidarity, care, and political action in a moment of social upheaval.
 
The Auntie Sewing Squad is a quirky, fast-moving, and adaptive mutual-aid group that showed up to meet a critical need. Led primarily by women of color, the group includes some who learned to sew from mothers and grandmothers working for sweatshops or as a survival skill passed down by refugee relatives. The Auntie Sewing Squad speaks back to the history of exploited immigrant labor as it enacts an intersectional commitment to public health for all. This collection of essays and ephemera is a community document of the labor and care of the Auntie Sewing Squad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780520384019

Book preview

THE

Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to

MASK MAKING,

RADICAL CARE,

and RACIAL JUSTICE

PRAISE FOR THE AUNTIE SEWING SQUAD GUIDE TO MASK MAKING, RADICAL CARE, AND RACIAL JUSTICE

A wonderful, motley, no-bullshit collective history of a singular and beautiful mutual-aid project—a collective that, in crafting and distributing masks as an expression of radical solidarity and capacity-building, reclaims the politicization of masks from the Right. In valuing care and beauty, embracing individual multiplicity and internal debate, the Aunties have assembled a subversive vision of liberation through accountability.

JIA TOLENTINO, author of Trick Mirror

This is far more than the important account of women warriors, armed with sewing needles, who organized organically yet deliberately into a movement for social change in the time of Covid—it’s an inspiring manifesto on building the Beloved Community. Please follow up with the field manual for global distribution!

HELEN ZIA, activist, journalist, and author of Asian American Dreams and Last Boat Out of Shanghai

"Decades later, these stories will shimmer as individual and collective testimonies of how a multigenerational, grassroots coalition of mask-making Aunties saved lives and celebrated life during a worldwide pandemic. This book sparks joy! It vivifies ‘creativity as resistance’ and everyday activism in ways that will add depth and breadth to the transdisciplinary study of social movements and social justice."

VICKIE NAM, editor of YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American

This book reflects a historical moment—the pandemic—yet links the response to the history of anti–Asian American racism, to solidarity instead of charity, and to challenges to the nuclear family. It captures the importance of mutual aid and how mostly Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Queer and Trans people of color respond at the intersection of feminism, racial justice, and gender fluidity.

YVONNE YEN LIU, Co-founder and Research Director of Solidarity Research Center

This indispensable book presents an unseen side of the restructuring of the global economy, which placed feminized Asian labor at the center of both garment production and reproductive and care labor. The Auntie Sewing Squad’s work also critiques the notion that market forces will step in to solve the problem of state failure, as the Aunties realized that even inexpensive masks were inaccessible to the most vulnerable communities. From all this comes an expanded and vital conception of solidarity.

GRACE HONG, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

This is the book we need right now! Through prose, poetry, interviews, and memoir, this inspiring collection shares the power of women of color, predominantly Asian American women, forming grassroots, guerilla-style sewing groups to care for racialized and Indigenous communities suffering disproportionally from Covid-19, systemic poverty, and state violence. These badass Asian Aunties offer a model for us all.

JUDY TZU-CHUN WU, author of Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity

Title Page

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Lawrence Grauman, Jr. Fund.

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Anne G. Lipow Endowment Fund in Social Justice and Human Rights.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2021 by Regents of the University of California

Illustration credits not included in captions: Audrey Chan, pp. xvi–xvii, 20–21, 36–37, 56–57, 74–75, 130–31, 166–67. Alina Wong and Heather C. Lou, p. 24

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005245

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005246

ISBN 978-0-520-38399-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-38400-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-38401-9 (ebook)

Manufactured in the United States of America

30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface, KRISTINA WONG, SWEATSHOP OVERLORD

Taxonomy of Auntie Roles, AUDREY CHAN

INTRODUCTION

We Go Down Sewing, MAI-LINH K. HONG, CHRISSY YEE LAU, PREETI SHARMA, AND VALERIE SOE

Auntie Sewing Squad Map, AUDREY CHAN

Auntie Sewing Squad Core Values: Transparency + Passion + Humor + Kindness, AMY TOFTE AND KRISTINA WONG

Auntie Sewing Squad Bingo, ALINA WONG AND HEATHER C. LOU

Ode to the Spreadsheet of Glory, LAURA KARLIN

A Mary Poppins Box of Supplies, LAURIE BERNADEL

Finding Fabric, CANDICE KIM AND SHARON McNARY

Recipe for Vegan Kimchee, GRACE J. YOO

Moment of Joy, CHEY TOWNSEND AND BEATRICE TOWNSEND

LABOR

Sewing as Care Work, PREETI SHARMA

Taxonomy of Auntie Care, AUDREY CHAN

The Evolution of Auntie Care, GAYLE ISA

Auntie Sewing Squad Care-Van, DUYEN TRAN

How to Sew Masks for Fun and No Profit in the Apocalypse, DANA LEAHY

Mask Ties and Earloops and Nose Pieces, BELINDA VONG YOUNIS

Bread, Roses, and Face Masks, ELLEN GAVIN

Home Sweatshop, LAURA McSHARRY

Recipe for Ube Halaya, IRENE TAYAG LAUT

SOLIDARITY

Sewing with Intent, CHRISSY YEE LAU

Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile Full of Ppe, BADLY LICKED BEAR

Badly Licked Bear Relief Van, BADLY LICKED BEAR AND KATIE JOHNSON

Dreaming of My Ancestors: Sewing a Network of Protection across La Frontera, JESSICA ARANA

Abuela’s Facultad, JESSICA ARANA

Solidarity Praxis, LAURETTA KANAHOA MASTERS

Monk Fabric, MELINDA CREPS

It’s in Your Blood: Warrior Alliances in the Time of Coronavirus, CONSTANCE PARNG

Three Generations, JONI BYUN

Recipe for Tsukemono Pasta Salad, DAVE VINDIOLA

A DAY IN OUR VIRTUAL LIFE

SURVIVAL

Sewing as Refuge, MAI-LINH K. HONG

Mending Time: A Movement Score, REBECCA PAPPAS

Mask Butterfly and Stencil Rose, JACQUELINE BELL JOHNSON

Rebirth, MĀHEALANI FLOURNOY

Sewing through a Pan(dem)ic, HELLEN LEE

How to Measure, Selfie, SANAE ROBINSON GUERIN

Recipe for Nourishing Salve, LAURA KARLIN

MUTUAL AID

Sewing the Pieces Back Together, REBECCA SOLNIT

ASS Quilt, MELISSA QUILTER

Science Is the Light on the Sewing Machine, KARL HARO VON MOGEL

My Dad Sewing, LISA PROSTAK

Querida Abuelita Rafaelita, LORENA MADRIGAL

Sewing Machine, LORENA MADRIGAL

Treasuring Mom, JOY PARK-THOMAS

Recipe for Earl’s Girl Pound Cake, DIANA WILLIAMS

POSTERITY

Teaching Sewing, Teaching Care, GRACE J. YOO

The Auntie Sewing Squad Kids Sewing Camp, GINA RIVERA

To the Rescue, DOMINIE APELES AND TEENA APELES

Technical Assistance Auntie, VIBRINA CORONADO

Connecting My Family’s One-Hundred-Year Herstory, JENNI EMIKO KUIDA

Sewing with Mom, WINNIE FONG

Sewing for the Next Generation, SYLVIA KWON

A Day in the Life of Westside Hub, DRAWN BY GWENDOLYN KIM, WRITTEN BY LEILANI CHAN, OVA SAOPENG, AND NOUTHAK SAOPENG

Recipe for Chocolate Shortbread Hearts, MELISSA QUILTER

we (can) do it, ELENA DAHL

Coda, MAI-LINH K. HONG, CHRISSY YEE LAU, AND PREETI SHARMA

Timeline

Auntie Sewing Squad Mask Sewing Patterns, MAI-LINH K. HONG AND CHEY TOWNSEND

Contoured Mask

Pleated Mask

Folding Mask

Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When each of us joined the Auntie Sewing Squad—a cutter in Los Angeles, California, a sewer in Monterey, California, and a sewer in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania—we simply intended to contribute to mutual aid in a time of failed government response. But we ended up writing a book together. Somehow, during the sheltering in place, the rapid shift to working from home, the stress of lost childcare, the loss of loved ones, and the rage of wildfires, we made masks and got words on paper. Much like the masks of the Auntie Sewing Squad, this book was created and supported by the organizing labors and love of a collective of people.

What began as a simple plan for a roundtable at an academic conference turned into a book deal. We thank Kristina Wong and Valerie Soe for their mentorship in the beginning stages of this project, for entrusting us with writing about the Auntie Sewing Squad, and for fiercely supporting our vision for the book. We thank our team at the University of California Press—Erika Bűky, Naja Pulliam Collins, Niels Hooper, Teresa Iafolla, Julie Van Pelt, and Madison Wetzell—for all your enthusiasm throughout this process as well as your careful editing. Thank you to our seasoned essay contributors (and Aunties) Rebecca Solnit and Grace J. Yoo, whose chapters lend additional depth to the complexity of the Auntie Sewing Squad. Special thanks to those interviewed for our chapters, including Monica Bullard, Wei-Ling Chang, Dolores Carlos, Jen Henehan, Van Huynh, Gayle Isa, Candice Kim, Lorena Madrigal, Marissa Nuncio, Constance Parng, Ova Saopeng, Annie Shaw, and Kathleen Smith. Thank you to the students who shared their oral histories in the first summer class on the Auntie Sewing Squad at San Francisco State University. Finally, thank you to our generous reviewers (who made their identities known to us) for their insightful feedback: Simeon Man, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Yvonne Yen Liu, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu.

There would be no book without the creativity and artistry of the Aunties. Seriously, what can’t the Aunties do? A tremendous thank you to all of the Aunties, Uncles, and Unties who contributed to this volume for their goodwill and patience. We also thank Laurie Bernadel and Kairos Marquardt for mapping data.

This project was also supported by many talented folks outside the Auntie Sewing Squad. Thank you to our timeline research assistants, Taylor Wong and Megan Maeda, for your important contextual findings. Thank you to photographer Carol Sheridan for safely capturing Kristina’s humor. Thank you to our illustrator, Audrey Chan, for her amazing visual pieces. Thank you to our indexer, Jordan Gonzales. Our gratitude also goes to the Albert LePage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University for the COVID-19 grant.

For many of us in the Auntie Sewing Squad, sewing and the community of Aunties have been lifesavers during the pandemic. For the coeditors, this book, as well as the ethics we built around writing this book together—our commitment to prioritizing our well-being and being accountable to our scholarly and activist communities, and our practice of defaulting to generosity and compassion—has been our lifesaver.

PREFACE

KRISTINA WONG, SWEATSHOP OVERLORD

August 2020

When I first started the Auntie Sewing Squad, the thinking was, When factory-made masks become readily available on the market, we will retire. What I didn’t realize then was that tens of thousands of people in America can’t access even cheap factory-made masks. Communities long forgotten by the federal government before the pandemic were now getting hit extra hard.

Never did I imagine that I would pull my mother and her friends out of retirement to order them around in my remote sweatshop. Never did I imagine that I would be politicizing the term sweatshop to point to the failure of the federal government in preparing us for this crisis. Never did I imagine how politically polarizing the act of wearing a mask would become. Never did I imagine how political the act of sewing two pieces of fabric together for a total stranger could be. Never did I imagine how many Aunties from all over North America would rage stitch with us.

And never did I plan for the group to make a book.

Before I became the Factory Overlord of the Auntie Sewing Squad—family, cult, labor camp, amateur medical supply company, shadow government aid agency—I was a performance artist who was scheduled to embark on a national tour of Kristina Wong for Public Office—a show about how I ran for and won a seat on my neighborhood council. In the before times, I sewed my set pieces and props. Never did I imagine that I would be using my half-assed home ec skills—previously used to stitch fabric ruffles into giant labia shapes—to make life-saving medical equipment. With used bedsheets and conference lanyards, at that.

I’m becoming the overlord of a Chinese sweatshop, I declared when the first volunteers to step forward were mostly Chinese and Asian American women. It wasn’t hard to see the irony of college-educated Asian American women, whose parents and grandparents did invisible, backbreaking garment labor to pay their debt to the American Dream, now performing that same work, like some kind of ancestral destiny. This time they were doing it for no pay, and with far less appreciation from others of the time and skill that sewing requires as we’ve become a country (Amazon-)primed for instant satisfaction without consideration for the workers who make our things. And even after much American manufacturing moved to China, here we were, diasporic Asians trying to put together an ad hoc assembly line from our home sewing machines. Oh America, the land of opportunity!

No craft store, not even (fucking) Joann Fabric and Craft Stores, was prepared for the 2020 trend of sewing cloth face masks to stop the spread of COVID-19. Every vendor in the country ran out of elastic and fabric, and factory-made masks were out of stock for weeks. I was like Robinson Crusoe, and my desert island was my home in Koreatown Los Angeles, waving down every hobbyist seamstress on Facebook for leads on where to find elastic. Aunties were chopping the straps off their bras, sawing the elastic off their fitted bedsheets, knitting I-cord from scraps of yarn. No T-shirt was safe, no half-finished quilt project too precious to sacrifice for DIY personal protective equipment.

In the early days of the pandemic (because this shit has gone on long enough for me to separate it into different eras), I was running in and out of my home ten times a day with fistfuls of elastic, meeting masked strangers to whom I had given my address on the internet because they had offered to help sew. I was buying dressmaking shops out of their stores of elastic for cash and immediately mailing spools away to strangers in other cities, even if the postage cost as much as the spools. Some of these strangers became Aunties in our group; others, I had to trust, were going to make good on their promises to sew masks for essential workers out there, not just resell them on Etsy.

In a moment of desperation, Auntie Karen offered her son’s well-washed underwear to us for its elastic and cotton fabric. We declined, but we did consider it.

As dozens of new Aunties flooded into our group, I shifted away from my sewing machine to become a supervisor, orienting new Aunties to the group. The playwright Amy Tofte, a casual rideshare acquaintance turned pandemic BFF, stepped up to get us more organized. We created a team of Super Aunties to identify the communities that were in real need, the ones that couldn’t wave down our help on the internet because they don’t even have internet. A few months in, the world found itself in a quadruple pandemic—health, racial, political, and economic. And the Aunties found ourselves with all the things that big organizations have—a logo, a fiscal sponsor, big donors, major press—but no salaries, no health benefits, no company retreat, and no end in sight.

I lean heavily into gallows humor because laughter is how I survive most things. The running joke is that I, the Overlord, will cut off the fingers and eat the babies of Aunties who don’t sew masks. We joke that we’re a cult and that this book you’re reading will be the Dianetics of sewing literature. The humor has preserved our sanity—or at least has helped us find hope in this very strange moment in history.

The great irony of this mask-making empire was that before the first Los Angeles lockdown, I refused to wear a mask. As an Asian American, I was already walking around with a mask I couldn’t take off—the mask that said to the world, Hey, blame me for the coronavirus. Adding a mask on top of my existing mask would bring attention that, even as a performance artist, I was not looking for.

But building ASS (which I didn’t realize was our acronym until a week after I made the Facebook group) has been a radical experiment in generosity, intersectional alliances, and a paradigm outside capitalism. I never set out to lead a remote sweatshop empire during the apocalypse, but that’s where unprecedented times take us. Like finding out that an old pillowcase can yield five face masks, we discover all sorts of things about ourselves that we didn’t know were possible.

If you’ve ever wanted to exploit unpaid manual labor, coerce children to help you, and be lauded as a hero, you have come to the right place . . . or at least, landed in a moment of American history where it’s become clear that we have no leadership, no supply chain, no infrastructure, and definitely no quarter-inch flat braided elastic.

If this is the end, we go down sewing.

We Go Down Sewing

MAI-LINH K. HONG, CHRISSY YEE LAU, PREETI SHARMA, AND VALERIE SOE

During the COVID-19 pandemic, after Kristina Wong suddenly found herself overwhelmed with requests for masks from friends, strangers, and hospitals, she realized she could not do the work alone. To whom could she turn who had sewing machines passed down from their immigrant mothers? Who hoards every possible thing just in case of an authoritarian government takeover or a global pandemic, and therefore would be ready with fabric, thread, elastic, scissors, irons, coffee filters, and paper towels? Who could use their ingenuity and scrappiness to assemble life-saving masks out of conference name badges and old cotton bedsheets? Who would be willing to spend all their time sewing for strangers? Who could rally their partners and children into performing unpaid labor?

She would need a squad of Aunties.

Why Aunties? Because Aunties get the damned thing done! Take Wong’s friend, Valerie Soe. On March 16, 2020, the nation’s first shelter-in-place order of the pandemic was issued by the mayor of San Francisco, a progressive woman of color, ahead of California’s statewide mandate. One day later, Soe pulled out her 1970s Kenmore sewing machine and hunted down 100 percent cotton woven fabric around her house, determined to make her own mask. A filmmaker and professor by day, Auntie by night, Soe believes in fighting on the ground to directly affect and protect people’s lives. While the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) and other US government agencies debated the efficacy of masks, Soe started sewing masks for healthcare professionals. She remembers sewing a mask for one healthcare worker who did not have the luxury of arguing whether someone’s freedom was being infringed on when they were asked to wear a mask. Rather, Soe explains, the healthcare worker was in the trenches fighting the virus and taking precautions to protect herself in any way possible to marginally increase her chances of survival. Soe did not want to waste time debating; she wanted to take action.

Soe became an OG Auntie, one of the original group members who helped form the Auntie Sewing Squad. A collective that began with a handful of Asian American women from immigrant families, the Squad later expanded to include other women of color, some white women, and a few Uncles and nonbinary Unties.