Culture-Keepers: Writing Story to Keep Self, Hope, and Legacy Alive

For this edition of #SistoryLessons, I'm thinking a lot about women’s voices in the face of adversity. Whether we have loved ones in harm’s way, are ourselves facing precarity, or are just highly attuned to the suffering of others that seems so dominant in our headlines as to be nearly “normalized,” we are all finding ways to navigate levels of adversity that feel quite unprecedented.

In these moments, I’m inclined to think about the origins of Brave Sis Project as a storytelling platform. The Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women we honor also faced precarious times. We often hear and use the saying “they did more with less.” What does this mean? They lived in times of less safety, less legal protection, less access, fewer rights—but possibly most significantly, less public interest and concern. It is only in more recent times that BIPOC* women were even included in the public discourse; so often, they were erased, dismissed, or spoken about only in the margins.

Despite these structural, societal, cultural, and gender barriers, these amazing Foremothers built movements, nurtured families and communities, changed laws, told the truth, and expanded what was thinkable.

So as awful as these days feel (trust me, I’m with you here), it’s not our time to lean into suffering, but to honor these women by “catching their fire” and using their example to fuel our resistance, perseverance, and courage.

In that spirit, lets lift up three women who you may not be familiar with (unless you've followed Brave Sis Project since the beginning). Each exemplifies how culture-keeping can be a form of resilience: Mary Paik Lee, who documented the Korean immigrant experience at a time when her very presence in the United States was a rarity; Liliʻuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch who preserved her people’s sovereignty and identity through memoir and song; and Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian feminist writer and physician who is not in my book Our Brave Foremothers but deserves commemoration for the ways she wielded her pen against patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarian rule, inspiring generations of women across West Asia and beyond.

All three, writers, not only inspire me as a writer myself, but they help us remember that, even in an era of attempted cultural revisionism and erasure, storytelling remains an act of resistance.

(*About that term, "BIPOC": We know this acronym is evolving and can feel reductive and misaligned for many. We use it here as a familiar shorthand, but please feel free to use whatever terms best reflect your values and community.)

Mary Paik Lee: "Quiet Odyssey"

Mary Paik Lee was born Paik Kuang Sun in 1900 in the Korean Empire, into a Christian family baptized by American Presbyterian missionaries. Her early childhood in Korea was marked by privilege—her family was educated, Christian, and relatively well-off. But the Japanese occupation of Korea shattered that security; her parents, like many Koreans of their generation, saw no future for their children under colonial rule and made the wrenching decision to leave their homeland.

Life in California was not much easier. The family lived in one-room shacks with no running water. Mary's mother cooked breakfast and dinner and packed lunches for thirty single Korean men who worked in the citrus groves—grueling labor for meager pay. Her father took whatever work he could find: janitor, potato farmer, mercury miner. From age eleven, Mary herself worked as a house cleaner for a dollar a week to help her family survive, and later worked in laundries, fields, and kitchens, whatever could help out. They moved constantly throughout the state, from Riverside to Colusa, and Claremont to Willows, facing crushing poverty and relentless racism: white Americans couldn't (or didn't care to bother to) distinguish Koreans from Japanese or Chinese, and after the Pearl Harbor attack, general hatred of East Asians only intensified.

Mary's parents knew education was the key to a better future, and their daughter was determined to make them proud. When there was no high school in the town where her family lived, Mary moved to another one, supporting herself by doing housework and yard work in exchange for room and board. This situation lasted about a year, until her family was finally able to move to a town with a high school and she could return to living with them.

She was still in high school in Willows, California when she met another Korean immigrant, HM Lee, who had left Korea in 1905, first living in Mexico before eventually making his way to the U.S. They married and started a family, continuing the hard work of making a life in a country that never ceased to “other” and discriminate against them. Despite the racism they faced, they raised their children with a strong sense of Korean identity, and Mary worked as a farmer and produce merchant while remaining active in the Korean independence movement, seeing her work in America not just as an act of survival but as part of a larger struggle to free Korea from Japanese rule.
When their homeland finally broke free from Japanese rule after the Korean War (though of course, now divided into two contentious neighboring countries), Mary and her husband continued their work as farmers, produce merchants, and apartment managers in California. She was widowed in 1975, and soon after, Mary moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where she volunteered as a Korean interpreter for seniors.

It wasn't until she was in her eighties that she decided to write her memoir, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, with the encouragement of Chinese American historian and pioneering scholar of Asian American studies, Sucheng Chan. The book, published in 1990, became one of the first memoirs by a Korean American woman, giving voice to a community whose stories had been largely invisible in American history.

Reflection: What parts of your family history are still unfolding in you?

Lili'uokalani: Songs of Sovereignty

Lili'uokalani was born Lydia Lili‘u Loloku Walania Kamaka‘eha in 1838 in Honolulu, into Hawaiian royalty during a time of tremendous change. The Kingdom of Hawai‘i was under growing external pressure as American missionaries, sugar plantation owners, and business interests gained power in the islands, and the Hawaiian monarchy fought to maintain sovereignty. Educated by American missionaries, fluent in Hawaiian and English, and accomplished in music and poetry, she grew up watching her beloved islands navigate the pressures of colonization and foreign interference. As an adult, she would become the first woman to rule Hawai‘i in her own right as queen.

When she was a young woman, however, another royal woman nearly reached the throne. In 1874, many Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian people) placed their hopes in Dowager Queen Emma Kalanikaumaka‘amano Kaleleonālani, the widowed consort of Kamehameha IV. Emma had been educated at the Royal School, an elite boarding school created by American missionaries for children of the highest-ranking ali‘i (chiefs), where she studied English, music, science, and Christian theology and received a strict Victorian education—Lili‘uokalani, as a royal, would also be educated there. Emma became known as a caring leader who championed Native Hawaiian health and education, and many ordinary people saw her as their “people's queen,” even after her husband's death. In the royal election of 1874, huge crowds rallied around Emma as their choice, but the legislature chose the candidate favored by many foreign businessmen and diplomats, David Kalākaua, Lili‘uokalani's brother. That sense of betrayal—and the memory of a beloved queen passed over in favor of foreign interests—lingered in Hawaiian political life as Lili‘uokalani came of age.

Seventeen years later, in 1891, King Kalākaua died and his sister Lili‘uokalani became Queen. Many Native Hawaiians still remembered how the government had ignored popular support for Emma and chosen a “puppet” of American and European business interests in the islands, and in the intervening years those interests only grew stronger. By the time Lili‘uokalani took the throne, American businessmen and plantation owners who had once preferred Kalākaua over Emma now opposed any strong Hawaiian monarch, considering Hawaiian sovereignty a threat to their profits, and pushed hard for annexation by the United States.

In January 1893, just two years after she became queen, Lili‘uokalani proposed a new constitution that would restore power to the Hawaiian people and reduce the influence of foreign business interests. In response, a group of American and European businessmen, supported by U.S. Marines who landed in Honolulu on January 16–17, 1893, staged a coup. They overthrew the Queen, imprisoned her in her own palace, and declared a provisional government. Hoping to prevent bloodshed, Lili‘uokalani did not call on her people to fight; instead, she surrendered under protest and appealed to the U.S. government to restore her throne, believing that President Grover Cleveland and the American public would recognize the injustice. They did not.

In 1895, after a failed attempt by her supporters to restore her to power, Lili‘uokalani was arrested and charged with treason. She was held under house arrest in ‘Iolani Palace for nearly eight months, allowed only one attendant and forbidden to see visitors or leave her rooms. Forbidden from leaving, she wrote music, something she'd been dedicated to all her life—during this forced confinement, she composed some of her most enduring music, including “Ke Aloha o Ka Haku” (“The Queen's Prayer”), a Christian hymn asking for forgiveness and strength, and compiled a Hawaiian-language songbook, using her music and poetry to preserve the stories, legends, and traditions of her people even as their kingdom was taken from them.

Hawaii's last monarch composed over 150 songs and chants throughout her life, including the Hawaiian national anthem and her most famous work, “Aloha ‘Oe”—originally written earlier as a love song, but after the overthrow it took on new meaning, as a song of farewell, not just between lovers, but between Hawai‘i and its sovereignty. Carelessly inserted into a million cartoon themes, it is still performed around the world today, generally without awareness of its political significance. Her music preserved Hawaiian language, traditions, and legends at a time when the U.S. government was actively suppressing Hawaiian culture, banning the language in schools, and erasing Native Hawaiian sovereignty from the historical record.

In 1898, the United States formally annexed Hawai‘i, making it a U.S. territory against the wishes of the Hawaiian people. That same year, Lili‘uokalani published her autobiography, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen, to ensure that the true history of what had happened would not be lost, writing with both dignity and sorrow about the theft of her nation.

Reflection: What do you stand to lose—and what will you never give up?

Nawal El Saadawi: Writing for Power and Dissent -1931 – 2021 — The Pen as Weapon

Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahla in Egypt's Nile Delta, into a family navigating British colonial rule, rising nationalism, and deeply entrenched patriarchal norms. The family valued education, but lived within strict gender expectations, and from an early age Nawal noticed the different rules applied to boys and girls, especially around schooling, marriage, and bodily autonomy. Although she herself had the great privilege of pursuing an education, she grew up bearing witness to most girls having dimmer futures due to limited schooling and early marriage—observations that fueled a lifelong refusal to accept women's suffering as “normal.”

Nawal was able to earn a doctor's degree from Cairo University and practiced medicine in rural areas, where she got a first-hand view of how poverty, patriarchy, and colonial legacies combined to harm women's bodies and lives. These experiences shaped her first major nonfiction work, Women and Sex, which challenged religious, cultural, and political authorities by naming sexual oppression as a core tool of women's subjugation.

Nawal used the power of the pen to reject these norms. She became a prolific writer, doctor, and activist, publishing novels, essays, and works of nonfiction that exposed the violence of patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, and state repression in Egypt and across the Arab world. She wrote fearlessly about topics many considered taboo, including female genital cutting, domestic violence, and the ways capitalism and imperialism collide with sexism in women's lives. Nawal operated in what feminist historians call a “third space”—moving between medical institutions, grassroots women's organizing, and international human rights circles, always finding creative ways to speak truth to power without waiting for official titles or permission.

Her words would cost her. Nawal was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health, her books were banned, and she was closely watched by the state. In 1981, she was imprisoned, along with scores of other dissidents, in a mass roundup ordered by then-President Anwar Sadat. But even in prison, she kept writing—using a smuggled eyebrow pencil and rolls of toilet paper to record her thoughts.

Nawal's bibliography spans novels, memoirs, essays, and critical theory, all centering the lives of women and the overlapping forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism. She insisted that women's liberation could not be separated from broader struggles for political and economic justice, and she refused both Western savior narratives and local fundamentalist backlash.

Even in the face of these trials, she refused to silence herself. Right up to her death in 2021, Nawal continued to write, teach, and organize, becoming a touchstone for feminist movements from Cairo to global diasporas and leaving behind a formidable legacy of intellectual rigor and uncompromising commitment to women's liberation.

Reflection: How do your race, culture, and gender interweave in your activism?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

As you consider Mary Paik Lee's story, ask yourself: How do you adapt to new environments? Write about a time you or your family started over in a new place. What did you carry with you, and what did you have to leave behind?

In honor of Lili'uokalani think about how you respond to loss with dignity. Write about a time you accepted change you couldn't control. What helped you maintain your sense of self through that transition?

Thinking of Nawal El Saadawi: How do you use your mind and your voice when you're not given a platform? Write about a time you spoke or created something that told the truth about your experience, even when it challenged the comfort of others.

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

In honor of Mary Paik Lee's story: How do your ancestors' migrations still shape your values? Share an immigration or migration story from your family. What did they risk? What did they preserve? How does their journey live in you today?

Thinking of Lili'uokalani, consider: What legacy of sovereignty runs in your blood? Learn about your ancestral leaders and their legacies—whether they were queens, community organizers, healers, or freedom fighters. How can you honor their resistance?

As you learn about Nawal El Saadawi: How do your race, culture, and gender interweave in your activism? Reflect on the unique position you occupy and how you navigate spaces not built for you. What is your “third space,” and how do you insist on telling the truth from there?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

In thanks to Mary Paik Lee: Study Asian American immigrant women beyond Japanese and Chinese narratives. Korean, Filipino, South Asian, and Southeast Asian women's stories are often erased even within Asian American history. Support organizations that help immigrants and refugees, particularly those serving Korean American and Asian immigrant communities.

To commemorate the valor of Lili'uokalani: Learn about Hawaiian history from Native Hawaiian perspectives—not the sanitized tourist version. Understand that to many with ancestral roots in the archipelago (and others of us as well!) Hawai'i is an illegally occupied sovereign nation, so learn a bit about land return movements and Indigenous organizing. Read Lili'uokalani's own writings, including her autobiography Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen.

In honor of Nawal El Saadawi: Study Arab and West Asian feminists who confronted both patriarchy and imperialism. Whose work has been censored, banned, or dismissed? Support translations, publishers, and organizations that amplify feminist voices from West Asia and North Africa, and challenge Islamophobic narratives even as you oppose gender oppression.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

Mary Paik Lee, Lili'uokalani, and Nawal El Saadawi each understood that she who controls the story control the future. Mary documented a community that was invisible in American history, inscribing a mostly unknown narrative into our national tapestry. Through her songs and autobiography, Lili'uokalani did her part to preserve Hawaiian sovereignty and identity even as her nation was stolen. And Nawal's novels, essays, and manifestos contributed to the global feminist canon by confronting patriarchy, fundamentalism, and authoritarian rule.

In this moment, when colleges are retrenching their humanities departments altogether, or where ethnic studies departments are under attack, when books are being banned, when the histories of marginalized communities are being erased from curricula, we need to fiercely preserve their legacy. We can honor these Foremothers by continuing their work: writing our own stories, preserving our languages and traditions, documenting our struggles and victories, and refusing to let anyone else define who we are or what we've accomplished.

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.

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