How We Thrive: Asian American Healing

Cultural stigmas and intergenerational traumas make navigating mental health in the Asian American community complex, but modern day practitioners and healers offer expansive frameworks for a holistic approach. Hosted by Bay Area journalist Cecilia Lei, join KQED and CAAMFest for an empowering evening to redefine community resilience by honoring all parts of ourselves.

The event will feature a discussion between licensed therapist Soo Jin Lee of the Yellow Chair Collective, healing practitioner Angela Basbas Angel and community activist, author and filmmaker Satsuki Ina. The program will include additional Asian American creatives and artists.

Guests:

• Soo Jin Lee, a licensed therapist and executive director of Yellow Chair Collective, as well as co-founder of Entwine Community, has carved a significant path in mental health advocacy, deeply influenced by her experiences as an undocumented Asian immigrant. Her approach to mental health care, centered on understanding and addressing the unique challenges of similar communities, has led her to co-author the impactful book, “Where I Belong: Healing Trauma and Embracing Asian American Identity.” Soo Jin’s work, recognized on platforms such as NPR, PBS, CBS, CUNY, and Buzzfeed, reflects her commitment to culturally sensitive services and the importance of community support in healing and identity formation.
  
• Satsuki Ina is a consulting psychotherapist specializing in trauma. She is cofounder of Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy NOW! And the documentary And Then They Came for Us. Her new memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest, details her parents’ incarceration during World War II. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Angela Basbas Angel is a healing practitioner, gardener, artist, medium/channeler and ceremonialist. She has continued her indigenous lineage as a traditional healing practitioner (Bontoc and Ibaloi tribes-Igorot, Philippines). In 2013 she began coordinating free holistic and traditional healing clinics with the Bay Area’s Healing Clinic Collective. She is a certified clinical herbalist and integrates indigenous ancestral medicine in her classes, including Ninunong Gamot, Philippine Folk and Ancestral Medicine and Decolonizing Wellness. Angela is a spiritual strategist and proponent of healing justice and decolonization.