ASAMST 173: “Asian American Creative Writing”
If someone is lucky, they’ll take a couple of courses throughout their educational career that will truly change their life. I consider myself to be extremely fortunate because I’ve taken more than a couple of life-changing courses during my four years at UC Berkeley alone.
When I was a student in the Fall Program for First Semester (FPF), I enrolled in a philosophy course to fulfill a breadth requirement and ended up liking it so much that for a good year, I considered minoring in the subject. My exquisite experience in XPHILOS 2: “Individual Morality and Social Justice” with Professor Richie Kim made me dubious that I’d take another standout course during my undergraduate education. Triple threats — classes that feature content you enjoy, a professor you find engaging, and a list of readings you actually read from cover to cover — can be hard to come by.
You can imagine my delight when I enrolled in ASAMST 173: “Asian American Creative Writing” and felt my world changing once again.
What is ASAMST 173?
ASAMST 173 is a creative writing seminar intended for students of the Asian diaspora. It is taught by the unparalleled Professor Fae Myenne Ng. I am quite serious when I say that you will never meet another instructor like her. An award-winning author, Professor Fae is highly knowledgeable about Asian American literature and the publishing industry itself. Her classes follow a workshop format: One or two students submit their work each week, and it’s critiqued in class by the entire group and outside of class by select writing partners.
Prospective students of ASAMST 173 can expect to write a lot. From Professor Fae I learned that writing is a muscle, just like your quadriceps and lateral deltoids, and needs to be exercised in order to grow strong. Never have I taken a class that requires as much writing as ASAMST 173, and never has my writing improved in a single semester as much as it did in ASAMST 173.
Coupled with a lot of writing comes a lot of reading. The literature you consume in ASAMST 173 is stylistically and ethnically diverse. We read newspaper articles like “My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles, short stories like “The Boat” by Nam Le, and excerpts of novels such as “The Buddha in the Attic” by Julie Otsuka. We also studied Asian poetry in translation. When there happened to be someone who could read a poem in its native language, we’d have them do so, listening to the rhythmic difference between the original and the translation. During our class, I heard Taishanese, Vietnamese, Bisaya, and Korean, among other languages.
By far my favorite work we analyzed was “The Gangster We Are All Looking For” by lê thi diem thúy. It is a lyrical tale of diasporic heartache among Vietnamese refugees, written by a woman who left her Southern Vietnamese village as a child during the Vietnam War. I was struck by its unique rhythm — cultivated by repetition, ellipses, and slashes — which I only noticed because we read the work aloud.
An excerpt from “The Gangster We Are All Looking For” by lê thi diem thúy.
Why is ASAMST 173 unique?
Because ASAMST 173 is offered through the Department of Ethnic Studies rather than the English Department, its content differs from a traditional creative writing course. While students do practice literary analysis and learn about craft elements like conflict, ASAMST 173 stresses emotional affect and personal history. Why does a certain piece resonate or not resonate with your lived experiences? How can writing a story be a way of unearthing memories that may seem lost? In this class, you are not learning how to write a piece of fiction; you are learning how and what it means to tell a story.
In ASAMST 173, you’re encouraged to embrace yourself and be unafraid of potentially going against hegemonic structures. Since a large portion of the students are immigrants, children of immigrants, or multilingual and multicultural, there is much more flexibility when it comes to employing grammar patterns and story structures that would likely be deemed “non-normative” in other classes. I loved, for example, reading the works of a classmate from Japan and seeing how Japanese sentence structure was inflected in her English prose.
Professor Fae describes her hopes for ASAMST 173 students as follows: “That they write their own stories; that they honor the cadence of their language, the rhythm of their words, and the truths of their ageless stories; and that they understand they have the power to bring these stories into today and tomorrow.”
Mister Dewdrop, Professor Fae’s 10-year-old endangered California Tortoise, in Ishii Court. A class favorite, he is often referenced during workshops.
How do students apply to ASAMST 173?
Like other creative writing workshop courses, ASAMST 173 requires an application. For fall, workshop applications are accepted until late July, and for spring, they’re accepted until mid-December. While seats for these workshops aren’t first come, first served, it’s a good idea to submit your applications earlier rather than later, and to apply for multiple workshops in the event that you aren’t selected for your top choice.
I was perusing the spring 2024 UC Berkeley Class Schedule for creative writing courses back in fall 2023 when I came across ASAMST 173. It was something close to love at first sight. I was enamored with the preview of the course’s description, which included an objective of translating one’s “bicultural and bilingual loyalties into full fictional narratives.” When I clicked on the course and read the class notes and application requirements, I became even more amazed. The professor requested applicants write a cover letter citing not only the usual information included in an introduction, but also their immigration history and fluency in ancestral languages.
The course description made it clear that this class would deal with dichotomies: the personal versus the political, the reader versus the critic, and the imagined versus the experienced.
I could tell that this was not a conventional creative writing course. It was, as its title suggested, a course rooted in the Asian American experience and Asian diasporic theory.
I submitted an application for ASAMST 173 along with applications for two other creative writing courses I was interested in, but I knew that if I got into ASAMST 173, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I wanted to take a class that would force me to write every day, consume more Asian American literature, and reckon with my racial consciousness. I wanted to take a class that would make me better.
What did I gain from ASAMST 173?
ASAMST 173 teaches you more than just how to be a better writer. It equips its students with the tools to decode their own history, express themselves in a way that is culturally and personally authentic, and navigate systems that have historically undervalued creatives of color.
I won’t divulge all of my insights from ASAMST 173 because I believe students should take it for themselves, but I’ll end this article by saying that the most important thing I learned from Professor Fae was how to let go. I’ve always been protective of my personal writing, but this course taught me that when I put my words on the page, I am distancing myself from them; they are out in the world, independent from me and my perception of their meaning. That is not a disadvantage but a gift. To let a story go is an act of courage, and as writers, we must be fearless.
If you’re interested in making sense of your life through storytelling and growing your writing skills in the process, consider applying to ASAMST 173. It just might change your life.
Professor Fae and students from her course ASAMST 176: “Siblinghood in Asian American Literature”—which she fondly calls the sister course of Asian American Creative Writing—in conversation with rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres. This event took place in spring 2026.
Nina Takahashi, Class of 2026, is majoring in film & media and minoring in Japanese and creative writing. Cover photo features an image by Danny Nguyen, and an image designed by Jasmine Flores Rosete, photographed by Danny Nguyen and Mariyah Janelle Tabuno, and edited by Danny Nguyen.
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