From Queens to Shanghai: Baruch Professors Receive CUNY Grants to Explore Asian American Diasporic Life
April 11, 2025
Two distinguished faculty members from the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences—Yuchen Chen and Sally Wen Mao—have been awarded research grants from the Asian American/Asian Research Institute’s Faculty Research Support Program.
The non-partisan institute, which was founded in 2001 by The City University of New York (CUNY), is a university-wide scholarly research and resource center that focuses on policies and issues that affect Asians and Asian Americans.
The program’s $8,500 grants to each professor will help support their research projects.
Yuchen Chen: Examining NYC’s “New Chinatown” through Digital Media
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Yuchen Chen’s project, “The Digital Infrastructure of New York City’s ‘New Chinatown,’” examines Chinese immigrants and real estate entrepreneurs in West Queens, exploring their placemaking practices in an emerging community.
Dr. Chen’s research focuses on how Chinese ethnic media platforms mediate these processes and introduces the concept of “infrastructure” to understand diasporic identity and placemaking. By shifting the focus to the materiality of digital platforms, the study reveals how they facilitate the circulation of people and cultures within the Chinese diaspora.
Chen, who experienced being “stranded” in the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic while pursuing graduate studies, brings a personal lens to her research on the shifting dynamics of mobility and immobility in a digitally mediated world.
“My work aims to bring in the lived experiences of Chinese diasporic placemaking and market-making, especially the international students, white-collar knowledge workers, and entrepreneurs,” Chen says. “My work has discussed how they are invisibilized—either because of their socioeconomic status, their immigration status, or ongoing anti-China sentiment—but they are subject to forms of othering that we need to explore more to understand how platform capitalism together with racial capitalism today works hand in hand.”
Sally Wen Mao: A Poetic Journey Through Place, Heartbreak, and Heritage
Assistant Professor of English and acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao is using her AAARI grant to support Sally Forth, Sad Girl!, a novel-in-progress that blends fiction and personal history.
The loosely autobiographical story follows Samara Pang, a Chinese American poet navigating an artist residency in Shanghai. Through Samara’s eyes, readers will journey from Shanghai to New York to California, exploring themes of solitude, diasporic wandering, heartbreak, and art-making as the she connects with fellow artists, experiences fleeting love affairs, and reflects on her mother’s birthplace.
Dr. Mao’s debut novel will delve into the transient lives of artists and the complexities of being an Asian American drifter.
“I am thrilled to be an award recipient because AAARI CUNY is a great place for scholars and innovators of the Asian American experience,” Mao said. “Ten years ago, I taught at Hunter College in the Asian American Studies department, and the events and panels that AAARI put on were some of the most exciting. I feel very excited to represent AAARI.”
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