CAAEJ Focuses On Asian American Advocacy in Environmental Activism
Andrea “Chuey” Chu, at her home in Uptown, conceived of her workshops after seeing how white environmental justice academic and activist spaces could be. Photo by Carolyn Chen.
Andrea “Chuey” Chu is building the bike as she rides it.
This is how she describes leading Chicago Asian Americans for Environmental Justice (CAAEJ), a volunteer-driven organization whose mission is to advocate for environmental issues as they relate to Chicago’s Asian immigrant community. Chu was inspired to start the organization after noticing a dearth of environmentalist groups with a focus on Asian American issues, or with a significant Asian American presence to begin with.
“My academic background is in environmental science,” Chu, who is originally from Ohio and completed her undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, said. “But I found a lot of the environmental justice spaces were really white and rather alienating.”
CAAEJ, as it exists today, began taking shape in 2018, when Chu realized running an organization at this exact intersection would present its own unique challenges. She was moving into uncharted territory; she could not be sure that people even knew of the specific environmental injustices endured by Asian American communities.
Without much of a blueprint at all, she started to assemble the bike that is CAAEJ. She began holding an “Asian Americans and Environmental Justice” workshop at her home in Uptown. The workshop, which Chu continues to hold monthly, is designed to build on attendees’ existing knowledge on issues of environmental injustice. However, Chu aims to recontextualize this in a framework of how those issues can specifically affect Asians and Asian Americans, a perspective she acknowledges many may have not considered before. She typically opens her presentations by posing the question: why should Asian Americans care about climate change?
Andrea “Chuey” Chu (far right) estimates her Asian Americans & Environmental Workshop has attracted at least 100 attendees. Photo by Carolyn Chen
“The issues that we're working on as a community are not unrelated to environmental issues,” Chu said. “And so I wanted to make sure that I could draw out the already existing connections between those two realms.”
One such connection emerged in 2019 as Bridgeport resident and CAAEJ member Kelly Chen was beginning to voice concerns about the possibility of contaminated soil in heavily concentrated areas of Asian immigrants in the city. She soon caught the attention of Chicago’s network of environmental organizers and a mutual friend eventually connected her with Chu, who has held positions with Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Food and Water Watch.
Though CAAEJ was still in its earliest days, Chu, as the organization’s founding member and leader, decided to prioritize polluted soil because of the popularity of backyard gardens in Asian immigrant households, coining the effort the Chinatown Environmental Justice Initiative (CEJI). Chen says self-tended gardens not only allow for food diversity and sovereignty, but also provide a connection with the larger community and culture.
“When we’re talking about what it means for the Asian American community here to be growing and eating certain foods, it’s not only what connects us to the motherland...it also connects us to the people around us who are similar to me in these ways,” Chen said.
Chen tested a soil sample from her family’s own backyard garden in Bridgeport and found lead levels above the EPA-approved threshold of 400 parts-per-million. Chen, who earned her masters degree in urban planning from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, realized that if her own family’s soil was contaminated, other families in the surrounding area were likely similarly affected.
CEJI’s aim to raise awareness on the possibility of contaminated soil to the larger community seems to put Chu’s workshop opening question — why should Asian Americans care? — into practice. The members of CAAEJ now have the daunting task of distilling and disseminating the idea that harvesting and consuming the foods of your homeland in adopted soil could put you and your family in danger.
CAAEJ members attend a monthly meeting to discuss the progress of the Chinatown Environmental Justice Initiative. Chu estimates there are 10 to 15 people actively working on the CEJI project. Photo by Michael Wu.
“Chicago is a really industrial city, both past and present,” Chu said. “So, the Southwest side is still pretty manufacturing heavy. We know that these areas are often seen as sacrifice zones...where industry tends to already be concentrated… so communities of color are often carrying the burden of environmental injustice.”
Lead tests are the simplest and, at around $25, the cheapest ones CAAEJ utilizes. More comprehensive tests can detect possible toxins such as chromium, cadmium and arsenic, which can cost up to $100. CAAEJ currently pays for the soil tests it performs, though Chen is unsure how long the organization can keep absorbing these costs.
“We have fundraised a bit of money to be able to cover the costs of these tests but we’re not sure what might happen in the future,” Chen said. “We’ve been working actively on this soil lead testing project for the last ten months and it’s just been such a learning process. We come up with new issues seemingly every month that we have to work around, but at the same time [we only] have so much capacity.”
The organization is currently working to perform soil tests in neighborhoods with dense concentrations of Asian immigrants including Bridgeport, Chinatown and Armour Square. Many of the crops grown hold a cultural significance to the gardeners, such as bitter melon, winter melon, sweet potato leaves and Chinese eggplant; crops that are not typically found outside of Asian grocery stores, if they can be found there at all.
Chen explains the gardener’s intrinsic attachment to these foods makes it difficult to effectively illustrate the situation’s severity, and cites her experience testing her family’s soil as an example.
“My parents — who immigrated from China and they had only a high school education — they understand the concept of contamination. I think they just still don’t believe that we’re really affected,” Chen said. “That’s one of the really insidious things about environmental justice, it’s not something that’s necessarily in your face like cancer. They're much harder to prove so it’s just a much more difficult conversation to have with people who don’t have a stronger understanding of what this means.”
Still, it is hard to deny the importance of everyday maintenance of a backyard garden for many Asian immigrants, especially among the elderly. To mitigate lead levels, Chu suggests excavating and replacing soil, composting to dilute lead concentrations and using raised beds. She also says that participating in community gardens could present as a safer option.
Kelly Chen, who helped spearhead the CEJI project with her own soil testing efforts, lists the language barrier as one of the project’s largest obstacles.
However, Chu is hesitant to imply she has a definitive solution to contaminated soil. She points to an essential gap she believes exists between the most dedicated, and typically older, gardeners, and the second generation immigrants they have raised, especially those that have attended school in the United States and are more attuned to the effects and urgency of environmental injustice.
“The folks that come to the [CAAEJ] meetings are mostly people... that skew a little bit younger than the gardeners themselves,” Chu said. “This is really about folk’s health, and particularly people's grandkids, because lead really affects children in particular. So, we want to make sure that we're not talking about lead in parts-per-million or really scientific terms, but... in ways that are accessible to people.”
CAAEJ’s communication barriers go beyond attempting to communicate the country’s history of environmental racism in a digestible way to an elderly population who may be unfamiliar with the fundamentals of environmental justice. Chen says the organization also must contend with the wide breadth of languages and dialects spoken among Chicago’s Asian immigrant population.
“Even if we are able to grab someone and sit down for a conversation, almost all of the members we have at CAAEJ either cannot speak the language, speak the specific dialect, or if they are able to speak the language or the dialect of the person we’re talking to, we have the vocabulary of a five year old,” Chen said. “It does not make for a persuasive argument.”
Additionally, the lack of readily available desegregated data for different Asian ethnicities — more than 50 ethnic groups are typically lumped together — that illustrates the wide economic disparity between populations presents another unique challenge for Asian American activists. Chu says this helps explain the absence of Asians in environmental justice spaces that CAAEJ is attempting to remedy.
“There is generally this perception that Asian Americans don't suffer from environmental injustice the way that black and Latinx communities do, and I think that the model minority myth plays into that assumption,” Chu said. “People don't know what issues Asian Americans are facing and what sort of barriers are keeping them from getting the support that they need in a number of different ways.”
Chen and Chu both mention Little Village Environmental Organization (LVEJO), which is committed to extending the “self-determination of immigrant, low-income, and working-class families,” as an inspiration for CAAEJ. They also name Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), a community-led organization based out of Richmond and Oakland, CA. However, in terms of environmental organizations that focus on advocating for Asian American communities and the issues prevalent specifically in the Midwest, Chu says CAAEJ has no specific group that it looks to as a model.
“I think what works for [grassroots groups like] APEN won't necessarily work outside of densely populated Asian areas, like outside of California…[Chicago doesn’t] have the kind of population density that East and West coast folks have,” Chu said.
Chen maintains a similar theory for the absence of Asian Americans in the country’s history of environmental justice. She also references an analysis from WBEZ that states Asian Americans were the racial demographic with the largest percentage increase of people leaving Illinois between 2014 and 2018.
“There’s really not any sort of roadmaps, not any good ones especially since we think that the Asian [and] Asian American community has its own particular problems that other [communities of color] don’t necessarily face,” Chen said. “If we don’t have that many Asian Americans here then there’s not going to be any sort of critical mass of people going to these meetings and showing up and representing.”
Since its founding, CAAEJ has consistently gained traction among environmental activists and concerned citizens in the Chinatown area. Chu estimates at least 100 people have attended the workshop and a now steady group of familiar faces are turning up for CEJI’s monthly meetings and canvassing events. While the organization is still focused on the initiative to mitigate lead levels, a project that does not yet have a firm timeline, Chu says she hopes their efforts will allow the group to open up greater discussion with Chicago’s Asian immigrant population about larger issues affecting the community, including climate change, voting rights and Asian American political power.
She hopes the conversations CAAEJ starts will help her build the bike as she rides it.
“I think you'll be very hard pressed to find an organization that is both Pan-Asian and intergenerational that has a super broad and representative base in that regard,” Chu said. “We may have to find our own way. Not to reinvent the wheel, but… we have to tailor it to our own communities.”