The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice

"During this terrible time, when people like me are being attacked, the Auntie Sewing Squad gives me heart. They have written a practical guide--including patterns--for making masks, making community, and making us safer. Thank you, Aunties."--Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace and winner of the National Book Award

"This is far more than the important account of women warriors, armed with sewing needles, who organized organically yet deliberately into a movement for social change in the time of Covid--it's an inspiring manifesto on building the Beloved Community. Please follow up with the field manual for global distribution!"--Helen Zia, activist, journalist, and author of Asian American Dreams and Last Boat Out of Shanghai

"The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice is a wonderful, motley, no-bullshit collective history of a singular and beautiful mutual aid project--a collective that, in crafting and distributing masks as an expression of radical solidarity and capacity-building, reclaims the politicization of masks from the Right. In valuing care and beauty, embracing individual multiplicity and internal debate, the Aunties have assembled a subversive vision of liberation through accountability. This book makes for encouraging, galvanizing company for anyone interested in translating desire into action and moving from isolation into community."--Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

"Decades later, these stories will shimmer as individual and collective testimonies of how a multigenerational, grassroots coalition of mask-making Aunties saved lives and celebrated life during a worldwide pandemic. This book sparks joy! It vivifies 'creativity as resistance' and everyday activism in ways that will add depth and breadth to the transdisciplinary study of social movements and social justice."--Vickie Nam, editor of YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American

"Kristina Wong used her crafty skills from sewing sets and props for stage to start making masks in an effort to help others and she quickly assembled a team of volunteers called the Auntie Sewing Squad, and together the group has distributed more than 55,000 masks in three months! I'm a big fan."--Good Morning America, July 28, 2020

"This book reflects a historical moment--the pandemic--yet links the response to the history of anti-Asian American racism, to solidarity instead of charity, and to challenges to the nuclear family. It captures the importance of mutual aid and how mostly Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Queer and Trans people of color respond at the intersection of feminism, racial justice, and gender fluidity."--Yvonne Yen Liu, Co-founder and Research Director of Solidarity Research Center

"This indispensable book presents an unseen side of the restructuring of the global economy, which placed feminized Asian labor at the center of both garment production and reproductive and care labor. The Auntie Sewing Squad's work also critiques the notion that market forces will step in to solve the problem of state failure, as they realized that even inexpensive masks were inaccessible to the most vulnerable communities. From all this comes an expanded and vital conception of solidarity."--Grace Hong, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference
"This is the book we need right now! Through prose, poetry, interviews, and memoir, this inspiring collection shares the power of women of color, predominantly Asian American women, forming grassroots, guerilla-style sewing groups to care for racialized and Indigenous communities suffering disproportionality from Covid-19, systemic poverty, and state violence. These badass Asian Aunties offer a model for us all."--Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, author of Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity