On February 10, the Asian Student Association (ASA) hosted an event in partnership with Compassionate Home Action Together (CHATogether), an Asian mental wellness initiative founded by Dr. Eunice Yuen, a Yale researcher and child psychiatrist specializing in Asian and Asian-American mental health.
The event consisted of a scene played out by Choate students Naina Sharma ’21 and Allen Zheng ’21 acting as a child and a parent, respectively. The scene depicted an 18-year-old Asian-American child coming home to their parents after their first semester at Stanford. The child was described to have been academically talented and passionate, but also to have been living in the shadow of their older sister, a successful computer scientist at Google. The child wanted to make the parents proud but also hoped to follow their own passions. The parent role was a 43-year-old Asian immigrant engineer who was supportive of their child but also felt that their child needed to pursue a field with more security and a better salary.
What ensued was a tense interaction between the child and the parent, of which two endings were portrayed: one in which the child and parent ended up fighting, and another in which the parent and child reconciled their different perspectives and learned from each other. After the scene was acted out, students split into breakout rooms to discuss how they felt after watching the scene unfold and how they related to the events portrayed.
Dr. Yuen’s events are different from the traditional psychiatric approach. “We are using [interactive theater] as a way to help the community create a safe space to talk about really stigmatized topics such as mental health,” Dr. Yuen said. This interactive theater seeks a direct response from its audience. The argument between the child and parent was meant to simulate a reality that may be present in Asian-American households. Dr. Yuen attributes this Asian care for children not only to culture but also to potentially harmful western stereotypes like the common tropes of the “Asian Tiger Mom” controlling her children and the Asian model minority myth.
With interactive theater, Dr. Yuen wishes to break these stigmas. “CHATogether is really using a lighthearted way — interactive theater — to address cross cultural issues, especially in Asian and Asian-American families,” said Dr. Yuen. It is her hope that interactive theater will make these issues more accessible to all students.
While the organization typically hosts meetings with Yale undergraduate students, the initiative has recently collaborated with Harvard University to host events in the greater Boston area as well.
Dr. Yuen believes that, despite the setbacks of Covid-19, the widespread usage of Zoom has assisted in making CHATogether events more accessible, as it has eliminated the need for students to be physically present at events. This new adaptation has enabled CHATogether and the ASA to bring workshops to Choate. The event this week was CHATogether’s second collaboration with the School; CHATogether hosted their first meeting with ASA in October.
“We were able to get a lot of students to come to our meeting,” said Max Su ’21, president of the ASA. “The conversations we had in smaller breakout rooms directly with students were pretty meaningful as well.” Students saw pieces of their own experiences mirrored in the interactive theater.
Dr. Yuen emphasized, however, that the importance of this work lies not in the designed programs themselves, but in the community engagement they inspire. “I want to encourage anyone to give us skit ideas and any feedback with the hopes that we can become a long-standing program at Choate and in boarding schools overall,” Dr. Yuen said. Although ASA continues to function as an independent club at Choate, Dr. Yuen is planning on future collaborations with the student group.
After this second collaboration with ASA, Dr. Yuen has expressed hope that the interactive theater system will help facilitate greater and more frequent conversations about parent-child relations, academics, and race at Choate and beyond.
