Dr. Evelyn Chiang

Dr. Evelyn Chiang (she/hers) is a Psychology professor at UNC Asheville. She is Chinese American. She was born in Indiana after her parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1970s. She grew up near Jacksonville, Florida, where there was a fairly large Chinese community. There was a Chinese church on Sundays. Occasionally, there was Chinese school as well as cultural events. Her high school was a college preparatory school and was fairly diverse. For undergrad, she attended New College, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida, and was one of a handful of Asian students in the student body of about 500-700 students. She then went to the University of Florida for her graduate studies in Educational Psychology and was hired at UNC Asheville in 2007. 

In terms of race/ethnicity: “I have always been very aware of being Chinese. At home, we were only allowed to speak Chinese, and I did not learn English until I started kindergarten at age four. We were in Miami at the time, and I recall attending English language programs that were conducted in Spanish. Growing up, I remember that my parents exclusively socialized with other Chinese families. For a while, we had big dinner parties together, with 5-6 families, almost every weekend. When we moved to Orange Park and I started my new elementary school, there was just one other Asian child, with whom I immediately became friends. Maria was Vietnamese and other students would constantly ask, ‘Are you sisters?’ I was very sad when she and her family moved to California a few years later. My high school (7th-12th grades) was completely different in terms of diversity. It was a college prep high school and highly diverse. There was a small, tight-knit group of students a year older than me, and they kindly welcomed me into their group. I’m not positive where everyone was from, but I think several of the girls were Cambodian and one was Chinese. Throughout high school and college (both undergrad and grad), I didn’t spend a lot of time or energy thinking about what it meant to be Chinese. This continued when I got my first academic job in 2007 at UNC Asheville. At some point, someone asked me to join Asian Studies and my immediate response was, ‘But I don’t study Asians.’ Instead, I put a lot of time and energy into disability, helping to establish UNCA’s Disability Cultural Center and advocating for disabled students as a highly marginalized minority on campus. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and hate crimes against Asian people escalated dramatically. The Atlanta spa shootings occurred. And I’ve come to see a critical need to advocate for Asian/Pacific Islander populations. The ‘model minority’ myth is a lie; it is a harmful projection of racist stereotyping. It erases the differences between Asian peoples and implies that we are already well off and shouldn’t complain or demand change. I am ready to demand change.”