Scholarship | Dr. Mai-Linh K. Hong

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

Coedited by Mai-Linh K. Hong, Chrissy Yee Lau, and Preeti Sharma

with Kristina Wong and Rebecca Solnit

University of California Press

[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.

Jia Tolentino,
author of Trick Mirror

During this terrible time, when people like me are being attacked, the Auntie Sewing Squad gives me heart. They have written a practical guide—including patterns—for making masks, making community, and making us safer. Thank you, Aunties.

Maxine Hong Kingston,
author of The Fifth Book of Peace and winner of the National Book Award

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

Articles/Essays

Open-access versions of most scholarship may be found in the University of California's eScholarship repository. If you have trouble accessing an article, please contact me.

"Turf and Terror: Ground Zero, Sacred Space, and the Battle over Park51," with Kimberly Love, Race, Space, and Culture: Essays on Cultural Theory and the Built Environment edited by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon B. Ross (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press, summer 2026)

'Nothing but My Own Whole Body': Revisiting Radical Haiku Through Violet Kazue de Cristoforo’s Life and Work, Amerasia Journal 49.1–2 (2024)

The Refugee’s Now: The Art and Advocacy of Matt Huynh, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6.1 (2020)

Navigating the Global Refugee Regime: Law, Myth, Story, Amerasia Journal 46.1 (2020)

'The Deep Root Snapped': Reproductive Violence and Family Un/Making in Quan Barry’s She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Asian American Literature: The State of the Art and A Literary Response to Cathy Schlund-Vials, Massachusetts Review Blog (2020)

Narrative in the Shadow of the Refugee Regime, The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought (2017)

'Get Your Asphalt Off My Ancestors!': Reclaiming Richmond’s African Burial Ground, Law, Culture, and the Humanities (2017)

Reframing the Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives in the Post-9/11 Period, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) 41.3 (2016)

A Genocide by Any Other Name: Language, Law, and the Response to Darfur, Virginia Journal of International Law 49 (2008)

Research Comic

Perilous Telling: On Refugee Story, illustrated by Eli Africa, Bobcat Comics, UC Merced Center for the Humanities (2023)

Book Review

Review of Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon by Phuong Tran Nguyen, International Migration Review (2019)

Research comic titled "Perilous Telling: On Refugee Story." Story by Mai-Linh Hong. Drawings by Eli Africa. Comic depicts a young girl interviewing her mother, the mother declining to answer a question, and then the mother calling the family to eat by saying "Refugees, let's eat!" A caption at the bottom says "In an instant, my mother could convey a vivid memory of the camps. But if only I learned how to listen."

Comic with top caption "Can refugee story help us enact a refugee politics of care?" Image shows protesters in the background bearing signs. In te foreground, a woma sews face masks at a sewing maching. A little boy stands nearby holding a box labeled Mutual Aid.

Bobcat Comics

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

Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace and winner of the National Book Award

Helen Zia, activist, journalist, and author of Asian American Dreams and Last Boat Out of Shanghai