About
“I was always very acutely aware of being different and of my Asianness, so to speak, growing up in that community”
Photo Courtesy of Billy Fan
In 1991, an 18-year-old Billy Fan arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill bursting with ideas and eager for change.
Coming from diverse magnet schools in Wake County and with a familial upbringing that celebrated his Asian American identity and history, Fan was looking to meet other like-minded individuals to engage in candid conversations around issues of race and justice.
At UNC, Fan joined the Asian Student Association (now called the Asian American Student Association). Though he initially found that the dynamic conversations he was searching for didn’t exactly fit into the agenda of the social group, Fan would go on to run for ASA executive board, becoming the vice president his sophomore year of college and leading the organization his senior year as president.
During that time, he helped to establish “East Wind,” a publication run by ASA focused on identity, race and Asian American issues. Themes ranged from addressing the “model minority” myth to the representation of Asian Americans on screen and in cinema.
As Fan puts it, he cold-called Chuck Stone — legendary professor in the School of Media and Journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill and a pioneering Black reporter — and asked him for advice.
“I remember I’d go visiting [Stone] and I was just in awe of his pictures because, ‘Oh, that’s you with MLK. Oh, that’s you with Malcolm X,’” Fan recalled in a recent interview for Southern Mix. “And I just felt like I was in a room with a giant and I just told him, ‘I’m not a good writer. I didn’t get an A in English at UNC, but I wanna start this newspaper.’ And, I mean, the dude was like, ‘All right, I’m going to be your advisor. I’m going to give you $400 and let’s do this.’ And, you know, with his name, everything just kind of fell into place.”
Though East Wind no longer exists, Fan looks back fondly on the community and discussions cultivated through the group and with other student organizations on campus.
“We kind of set the groundwork of what we wanted. We wanted to have a better, bigger voice at UNC. And again, it was just a dynamic atmosphere, where the Black Cultural Center wasn’t built. It was a controversy if it should be built. And so the Black Student Movement was very involved, very dynamic. We fed off that. My friends who I knew at Enloe who were African American were involved with that. And we would have these conversations. And there was like a vacuum for an Asian American voice at that time, because it’s always been a social organization. But there was this awakening of just people who are like-minded.
Fan grew up in Clayton, N.C., a town just outside of Raleigh, then with a population of around 5,000. His parents first immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Taiwan, moving around from Illinois to Georgia before finally landing in North Carolina.
In Clayton, Fan’s father was one of a few doctors in the largely Black and white community. And across the whole county, Fan’s sister was the only other Asian person close to his age that he knew.
“I think I went through a lot of things that a lot of the typical Asian American kids would go through, like being made fun of. It’s more out of ignorance. You know, you hear the fake Chinese sounds when you walk through the hallways. And yet I was very limited of what I can do to get in trouble because I was an Asian kid. My dad was a town doctor. So, you know, everyone kind of knew who we were. I don’t think any of it was egregious, like overt racism, but it was just more of sort of being made fun of. So I was always very acutely aware of being different and of my Asianness, so to speak, growing up in that community.”
Still, he recalls his parents “assimilating” in different ways, with his father joining the local Rotary club (then “sort of a white man’s business organization”) and the family regularly attending services at the town’s Southern Baptist Church.
Eventually, Fan’s parents sent him to magnet schools in Raleigh, where took African American Literature classes and founded an Asian Culture Club, experiences he says were instrumental to his understanding of and interest in social justice issues.
Fan also credits his mother for instilling in him a deep sense of pride for the family’s Taiwanese roots.
“She really instilled in me at that time why I should be proud of being Asian American, the history that we have, why we’re different,” he said. “And I think that really emboldened me in the future to be proud of who I am, because I knew how it was like to be ostracized. And I appreciated that my parents didn’t cower to that. They never wanted to make me more ‘white,’ but to be proud of who I am in this community. And I think that really helped me carry that mentality on as I went to college and onto UNC and into high school, where I went to Enloe, actually in Wake County.”
In his interview for Southern Mix, Fan traces other crucial aspects of his upbringing in the South, from the fracture between Chinese and Taiwanese churches in the area to the different identifiers he uses to describe himself (Southerner included) and the challenges of navigating a landscape seemingly dominated by a Black-white binary.
Fan now works as a nephrologist and lives in Raleigh with his wife and children. During the fall of 2021, the Asian American Center held a series of celebratory events marking the physical opening of the center — Fan spoke on a panel, along with other Asian American alumni, to share his experiences of advocating for more AAPI+ spaces and presence on campus.
In reflecting on the growth of the AAC — which welcomed its first batches of students to the center nearly 30 years after Fan first started his undergraduate degree — he noted the power and significance of building relationships in constructing a shared community.
“I think that’s what life is all about, right, not to get too philosophical,” Fan said in his interview. “But it’s like relationships with family, relationships with God, relationships with your kids. But a lot of this doesn’t exist without relationships with friends, like-minded people and cooperation. And I think something like the Asian American Center, or even the East Wind back then, it’s just a nice, shiny coin. But it didn’t exist without relationships and friendships and cooperation. So I think it really comes down to people.”
Listen to Fan’s full account of his experiences in North Carolina below
Read the full transcript with Fan here