By Justine Trinh
Everyone has a COVID story.
Although we are three years deep into the pandemic that constructed a new normal for all of us, it has been hard to forget the early days when life shut down. Lockdown prevented us from going outside and seeing loved ones. Breadmaking became the new indoor trend. Masks became a necessity that were in short supply and hard to obtain especially for vulnerable populations.
Enter the Auntie Sewing Squad.
Kristina Wong founded the Auntie Sewing Squad comprised of mostly Asian American women referred to as Aunties. These Aunties made masks and gave them to communities in need such as asylum seekers, Indigenous groups, incarcerated people, farm workers, and others who were unable to access or afford masks. The Aunties who did not know how to sew or make masks helped in other ways to support those who did by obtaining materials or sending care packages with homemade food. This radical care exemplified by the Auntie Sewing Squad is a form of resistance fueled by mutual aid premised on “solidarity, not charity.” Subverting the neoliberal capitalistic system that profits from us as individuals, the Auntie Sewing Squad shows that we only thrive by helping each other. This kind of (gendered) care and labor often goes unnoticed or undocumented, expected of those who practice it. Thus, The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice is a collection of essays, creative work, and ephemera meant to chronicle the efforts of the unnoticed, as well as to examine the work the Aunties did within a critical race and feminist lens.
“Subverting the neoliberal capitalistic system that profits from us as individuals, the Auntie Sewing Squad shows that we only thrive by helping each other.”
Although the Auntie Sewing Squad stopped making masks in August 2021, citing exhaustion and the availability of masks, the group did not disband. Rather, they shifted gears to providing support in different ways such as asking for donations for seamstresses on the Navajo Nation to make ribbon skirts or for Teams Brownsville who supports asylum seekers who are near Brownsville, Texas or are waiting in the Mexican cities of Matamoros and Reynosa. On their Facebook page, the Aunties are still active within their mutual aid and radical care efforts.
I personally resonated with this book because I lived through it both on a large macro scale and through the microcosm of my life. I remember when there were elastic and fabric shortages, and my mom was cutting up our old t-shirts as makeshift elastic to make masks for my coworkers and me. At the time, I was an essential worker at a for-profit elective medical implant production factory. While the company continued to bring in profits using the rhetoric of care that we were helping patients, worker benefits were cut in order to reduce costs, and we were not given proper protection despite being expected to come to work every day (and despite some people testing positive). My mom was never paid for any of the masks she made, despite the many requests that came in later, but her justification was that by protecting others, we protect ourselves. Even after she stopped making masks, she went on to volunteer at vaccine centers and helped arrange for those who were more vulnerable to access such resources. She now volunteers at the Vietnamese American Cancer Foundation.
The Aunties Sewing Squad and my mom show that care is not dependent on fanciful proclamations of “doing the right thing,” such as helping patients while exploiting workers for profit, but rather, care is the act of helping one another out as a form of social justice. This book is a guide to how to do this work and why we should all engage in doing so. Care is not simply just making masks, but is a form of activism that takes on many shapes and configurations. Before I started reading this book for a class presentation, I had multiple questions and reservations of its definition of care, coming from an environment that exploited such affective attentiveness. My questions consisted of “How do we care without being exploited?” “Is care sustainable?” and “Do we still care? Can we ever stop caring?” This book managed to answer them as well as show me that we should care.
The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide is available from Bookshop, Eastwind Books, Green Apple Books, Loyalty Bookstore, Village Books, Vroman’s Bookstore, and Wise Blood Booksellers.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.