Cecilia Birge - Anti-Asian racism during the Pandemic - Growing-up in Chinese Labor Camp - Student on Tiananmen Square protests
While President Trump has been calling the Coronavirus the Chinese virus and while the US is facing unprecedented protests against police violence and racial discrimination, Back in America is examining how these events have affected the Chinese Community.
In this episode, I speak with Cecilia Birge a former Montgomery, NJ mayor, a form bond analyst on Wall Street, now a head coach and a member of the Princeton High School Speech and Debate Team.
Cecilia shares her experience organizing fundraising with the Chinese community to help local first responders.
For us, she revisits her childhood in Chineses labor camps. As a student in Bejing during the Tiananmen Protests, she talks of her fear at the time and the turmoil in the city.
Today America is her home and the way she talks about this country and understands it help us see America in a different light.
From the conversation:
"These kind of bias and prejudice and racism comes from the same place, which is ignorance. For someone who deliberately uses their positions to practice this kind of racist views, they don't deserve the office." -- Cecilia Birge
"I was born in the dark ages of modern Chinese history. My father was a counter-revolutionary intellectual who spent years as a janitor, cleaning bathrooms and writing confessions before Mao's portrait." -- Cecilia Birge
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