Auntie Sewing Squad Made, and Distributed, 350,000 Free Masks

(p. C7) Kristina Wong is an in-your-face performer who, until this month, hadn’t performed for an in-person audience since March 2020.

. . .

While Wong was stuck at home in Los Angeles, she stayed busy leading the Auntie Sewing Squad, a volunteer group of mostly Asian American women she founded in March 2020 to make face masks for health care workers, farm workers, incarcerated people and others. She recruited 6-year-old children, her 73-year-old mother and others for the operation, which ballooned to more than 800 “Aunties,” a cross-cultural term of respect and affection for women, as well as “Uncles” and nonbinary volunteers in 33 states. Together, they distributed more than 350,000 masks.

“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” said Wong, a third-generation Chinese American from San Francisco.

. . .

In March 2020 your tour for “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was postponed. What made you want to start a mask-making group?

I was home without income feeling sorry for myself, and I stumbled across some articles that said there was a need for homemade masks. It started with me taking my Hello Kitty sewing machine and fabric and making a naïve offer to the internet: “If you need masks and don’t have access to them, I will help you!” But my ego wrote a check my body couldn’t cash, and within four days I was inundated with requests, so I started a Facebook group of people whom I knew could sew. We had Aunties cutting the elastic off their fitted sheets, the straps off their bras. It was a Robinson Crusoe situation.

Why did you call yourself a “sweatshop overlord”?

My first volunteers were all Asian women, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is the sickest moment, we are a modern-day sweatshop.” Our mothers and grandmothers did garment work — my grandmother and grandfather did laundry work as part of their rite of passage to America — and now we find ourselves doing this work again, for free, because the government hasn’t prepared us for this moment. So it was this gallows humor joke that I was the sweatshop overlord — also humor about child labor because I was ordering children around.

For the full interview, see:

Sarah Bahr, interviewer. “Kristina Wong’s Story: Sewing With Her Aunties.” The New York Times (Saturday, October 30, 2021): C7.

(Note: ellipses added; bold in original. The questions in bold are from the interviewer. The words under each question are quotes from Kristina Wong.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 19, 2021, and has the title “Kristina Wong’s Pandemic Story: Sewing With Her Aunties.”)

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