The BIPOC/ACCUTE First Person Interviews series is adapted from the CBC First Person series. It captures the stories and perspectives of BIPOC members of ACCUTE from different parts of Canada at different stages of their teaching, research, or graduate student careers. The interviews are presented in dialogue style to enable us to present participants’ stories and experiences in their own voices. We hope to encourage other BIPOC members of ACCUTE and future members to join the conversations. Please reach out to info.accute@gmail.com if you are are interested in joining the First Person BIPOC/ACCUTE series. We hope you enjoy reading our members’ stories and we look forward to hearing from you.  — Chinelo Ezenwa, Member-at-large, BIPOC Caucus

Chinelo Ezenwa:  Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with me. I really appreciate this opportunity to chat about BIPOC ACCUTE. I wonder if we could start with an introduction of your work and research. 

Lily Cho: Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Lily Cho, and I am a professor of English in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. I also serve as Vice Provost and Associate Vice President International at Western University. I am a researcher and have also been serving in administrative leadership positions since 2012. And I talk about this partly because the administrative work hasn’t been separated from my research, even though my research isn’t, you know, directly about university leadership. I think that sometimes there’s a perception that when you do administrative work, you’re no longer really connected to the research side of the profession. And I want to gently push back against that. I have found administrative work within the university to provide a space that helps to address unique research challenges. I approach my administrative leadership as a researcher first and treat administrative problems like research problems. It’s also intellectually enlivening and useful to think about how to lead the university in ways that are drawn from my training and work as a professor.  

I trained as a postcolonial literary critic and theorist. And certainly, I have found that work to be incredibly important in my role. Now we are at an interesting moment in higher education around the world. I was just in the Gulf region’s first summit, where I met with government leaders from all of the Gulf states to talk about their commitments to higher education for their people and their countries. And what really struck me was how much they deeply value the role of the university and the role of university education. This isn’t unique to the Gulf region; I would say this is also relevant for Asia, for Africa, and many parts of the world. In Oman, where I just was, where their universities are stellar, they also understand the need to invest in them and to continue to make them great. And then to come back to Canada, where the discourse is around austerity, around finding efficiencies, and also, where there’s a public discourse around the value of university education. And I think we take for granted that we have some of the best universities in the world and expect that they will stay that way. I don’t think they will. The idea that our universities in Canada will remain places that students and researchers will want to come to has a bit of a colonial hangover to it – the expectation that we can rest on our history because we are old. Yes, there is a legacy, but if we don’t nurture it, if we don’t protect it, and if we don’t sustain and continue to innovate around that legacy, we will no longer be in the global conversation around excellence. I think where I work right now (Western) is a great university, and I really love working here, but I think we have to work really hard to keep it great.  

 I’m so grateful for the postcolonial and decolonial training I’ve had. As an administrator and as a leader, I can bring to my conversations with counterparts around the world an understanding of how to relate to universities around the world in a way that is deeply multilateral, that is about mutual benefit, and that isn’t extractive. In order for us to be competitive, isolation is not the answer. And true forms of collaboration across national borders remain deeply, deeply important. 

CE: And that leads us to my second question about what it means to you to be “BIPOC” and a BIPOC member of ACCUTE? Are these identities you ascribe to yourself? 

LC: Yes, I can speak to these questions. I did my graduate training in the 90s and there were not a lot of “BIPOC” people in English studying in Canada at a graduate level. There were no courses in Asian Canadian literature. Yet one of the things that I value about the study of English literature in Canada, and that’s very personal to me, was that the mentors and colleagues I’ve had have remained profoundly curious about the boundaries of English and the study of English. And what that meant was that even if something wasn’t formally within the space of the canon that we had, I did feel quite supported in asking to move those boundaries, or to make them bigger or to think differently about them. 

My dissertation was on Chinese restaurants in Canada and their cultural significance. There’s one chapter about one book of poetry in that dissertation, and the rest of it doesn’t deal with literature at all. I think it’s a testament to the capaciousness of the field that I was awarded a doctorate in the study of English based on that dissertation. Looking back on it, I think that my mentors, my supervisor, my committee all tried to find ways to bring the questions that I had to the study of English. 

I didn’t explicitly identify as a person of colour in the academy for a long time. Because I didn’t want to be. I wanted my scholarship to stand on its own. And I will say that it was not until I became a university administrator that I began to talk really openly, at least in lecture rooms with students, if not in my writing, about being a person of colour, about being someone who enters the university from a family where English was not the first language, and about being someone who entered the university from a family where her parents hadn’t gone to university. And I found that I could give myself permission to do that because I saw how much it mattered to students to hear that, and to be able to share that experience with them was so meaningful.  

When I was invited to apply for the position at Western, as a standard part of the application package I was asked to submit an EDD statement, which is totally pro forma. I spoke candidly and honestly in that statement about how some of the worst experiences that I’ve had with racism and discrimination happened when I lived and worked at Western from 2003 to 2010. And that my hope was to recognize that experience, have it recognized, and to be given the capacity and resources and leadership to address some of those ongoing fundamental issues that had shaped some of those experiences for me in my work here in an earlier part of my career. I think it’s a credit to this university and to the search committee that they took that really seriously. But I do think, and again I speak as an administrator, that there are many parts of higher education that need decolonizing.  

In terms of being “BIPOC” ACCUTE, I’ll just say that I’ve been a member of ACCUTE since I was a graduate student in 1990, and that’s a long time to have been part of an organization. I’m incredibly grateful to ACCUTE and think that it’s one of the best scholarly organizations in the country. I think ACCUTE has always led in ways that are really important around issues that are important. And I would say to graduate students and junior faculty members that your scholarly associations matter more than you think. These are the places where we create community and where we change the conversations around our field and our discipline. 

Opting out of that conversation is a loss to you. I mean, these organizations exist for us, and I have always admired the leadership of ACCUTE. I also think that there is a profoundly important place for a generalist association. We live in a time of deep atomization and specialization, and I think we need to invest in the spaces where those conversations across specialties and across concerns can thrive. I think the ACCUTE Professional Concerns Committee, of which I was a member at one point, helped articulate some of the most important conversations in our field about what we need to do to make our field better and more responsive to the future of our discipline. The study of English in Canada remains overwhelmingly white. 

At the same time, I guess I think about the long trajectory. Not that long ago, one of my students defended her dissertation on Korean Canadian literature. I think it’s fair to say she identifies as Korean, Korean Canadian, Asian Canadian. And at the end of the defence, the external examiner, who herself is Asian Canadian, pointed out that we were in a room where almost every member of the committee was an Asian and an Asian woman, and the candidate was an Asian woman. And then we all cried. Because when she and I were in grad school, imagining that a room like that would exist was impossible—that we would have that much expertise at a senior level where you could have an entire graduate examining committee composed of Asian women in our field. It was not something we could imagine. So, yes, it could have happened sooner, but it certainly happened in the time it took for me to go from graduate student to full professor. I think that ACCUTE has had a really important role in such things, even down to having a BIPOC committee within ACCUTE.  

CE: Thank you so much for sharing these deeply personal experiences! Like you, I have found the space of English Studies in Canada and ACCUTE quite intersectional.  

To explore one of our more “fun” questions, I am going to ask what’s the most fun or most critically relevant “BIPOC” book or movie you have seen or read recently.  

LC: For me, it would be Everything Everywhere All at Once. As the name says, there’s a lot happening, but one of the things that has stayed with me so deeply is that complexity of grief and rage within racialized families and how we metabolize those effects, how we carry them forward, and what we do with that inheritance. These really moved me, and I still think about them.  

CE: I haven’t seen Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I’ll make a point of watching it soon. To go back to some of your earlier points, I really love that you’ve touched on your dual role as a researcher and administrator because I feel like the world is recognizing that not everybody doing a PhD is going to teach or even want to teach.  

LC: The life and work of being a professor is deeply privileged. And I hope that all of my colleagues continue to recognize that. But it is not the only way of being. And I do say to my students that universities are hiring all the time, and they are actually good jobs. When I was a professor, I did not understand how much work is involved in putting students in my classroom and in keeping them there. I just took for granted that there would always be students. But that’s actually not true. I later realized that there’s actually a huge team of people, staff, and university leaders who work very hard to ensure that when I walk into a classroom, there are students there who want to learn something. And so I think that the work of building the university, of making the university great, involves a massive team of brilliant people, and their work is important to the university. 

CE: I completely agree with that and appreciate you highlighting the work of all the incredible people in universities. Would you like to leave any final thoughts and words of wisdom with graduate students? 

LC: Whatever career paths they choose, first of all, the PhD is a time to fall in love with the problem, and that is the intellectual problem that you’ve brought to your doctoral program. It is a gift to have four years with some resources to think deeply about an intellectual problem. I really hope that as a graduate student, you came here because you were fired up, like I was with the significance of Chinese restaurants all over the country. I would also say to our graduate students to approach their research from the Tri-council perspective of knowledge mobilization. You’re doing cool work, but are you sharing it? Are you getting it out there? Are you testing your ideas? The point of a conference paper isn’t to tell everybody how brilliant you are. The point is to share something that’s in progress, that you’re testing out, and that you want to hear from your colleagues about so you can figure out how to make it better. What a gift to have that space! It is a gift to have people who are smart who want to hear what you think. So maybe you won’t enter the academy. There are lots and lots of great paths that are not about teaching. Out there in the world, you might be asked to be a part of solving different types of problems. One of my first graduate students at York is in grants with a hospital. And so much of her expertise started off with “what does it mean to win a SSHRC?”   

Dr. Lily Cho is Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President, International, as well as a Professor of English at Western University. Her current SSHRC-funded project, Asian Values: Fictions of Finance and Beautiful Money, explores diasporic movement and theories of value in postcolonial Asia. Her book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens, was also supported by SSHRC. This book won an Honourable Mention from the Photography Network’s 2022 Book Prize and won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2023 prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Multidisciplinary Category.