Let’s talk about being an immigrant or the child of an immigrant to the United States! Ruby member Aku Ammah-Tagoe and Urban School student Yudi Feng will moderate a roundtable of 1st-, 1.5-, and 2nd-generation women from a range of cultural backgrounds, from adolescence through their 40s. We’ll ask questions like: how do immigration and multicultural identity affect us at different life stages? Which family traditions do we keep, which do we leave, and why? Which words will we always, always mispronounce? There will be time for questions and discussion; together we’ll make a space to share and celebrate our unique identities.

This event is open to female and nonbinary-identifying attendees in high school or older. Family members are encouraged to attend together!

There will be light refreshments, and you are welcome to bring a snack with personal significance to share.

About the panelists

Aku Ammah-Tagoe (she/her) is a Ruby member and an English PhD candidate at Stanford. Her mother and father moved from Ghana to the U.S. 31 years ago. She'll never forget being in Accra when Ghana beat the U.S. during the 2010 World Cup.

Yudi Feng (she/her), born Xiaoyu Feng, is a junior at the Urban School of San Francisco. Her father immigrated from Shanghai, China when he was 18, and met her mother, a Bay Area native and Ruby Member (!), while working at a Japanese Restaurant in Mill Valley. Yudi spent her childhood between San Francisco and Beijing, and can speak both Mandarin and English.

Tara Kamali (she/her) is a senior at the Urban School of San Francisco. Her mother is both Iranian and Austrian and moved in the 90s while her father is Iranian and first immigrated during the revolution. She speaks Farsi at home and used to know German as well, but is hoping to relearn.

Mimi Lok (she/her) is a writer and editor, and also the cofounder of Voice of Witness, a human rights/oral history nonprofit dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, and was born and raised in Essex, a suburb outside London that is the Jersey Shore of England. After college she worked in Hong Kong for a few years before moving to San Francisco for grad school. She has lived in the US for more than a decade but still says "loo" instead of "bathroom."

Zahra Sadrane (she/her) is a senior at the Urban School of San Francisco. Her father immigrated from Morocco 30 years ago. Despite not being able to visit Morocco often, Zahra feels a strong connection to her culture through the Moroccan foods she eats daily.

Sibongile Sithe has this name, but is, honestly, pretty midwestern. Raised by a Zimbabwean refugee and a Nigerian-Brooklynite, she earned her BA from Yale University and was most recently a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. She's a writer and lives in San Francisco.

Adity Tibrewala (she/her) works at the intersection of community building and entrepreneurship. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2013 with a Bachelors degree in Comparative Literature, she began her career in the non-profit/social enterprise space as an Ops Manager at 1947 Partition Archive and a Community/Product Marketing Manager at Impact Hub Berkeley. She currently works at Facebook (via Crystal Equation), on the Community Partnerships team, to develop monetization tools for community leaders who've built meaningful communities using Facebook Groups. She is an Indian-American who immigrated to the United States at the age of 9.

Nikki Tran (she/her) is a soon-to-be recent graduate from Stanford, where she studies English and biology. She grew up in a Vietnamese family in Southern California, but has grown to appreciate the Bay area’s climate (namely, the trees).

Immigration, Generations, and Identity: A Panel Discussion