When I was a child, the mere mention of “summer school” was enough to scare most kids straight.

Little did I know then that many of my Asian American peers across the country were not only drilled and educated all day, every day in the summer, but for hours each afternoon during the school year, too.

U-M Stamps School of Art & Design professor Angela Chen’s new book, After School 課後, chronicles the author’s experience growing up (during the ‘90s and aughts) in this competitive subculture—both as a student and as the child of Taiwanese parents who owned a “supplemental school” called Futurelink, initially housed in a strip mall in Temple City, California.

“As a kid, none of us really wanted to be going to after school,” said Chen. “In Chinese, we call them buxiban … and in English, we refer to them as ‘cram schools,’ but among ourselves, as children, we called them ‘hell.’ Like, we hate going there. Nobody likes it. We all wish we could be at home, playing video games, or just with our families, having a nice cookie and milk snack or something. … But at the same time, as an adult, one thing I think about now is how a lot of my social life happened at Futurelink. Even though we were forced to study and do workbooks all the time, even in those 10 minutes of recess, or waiting for the van to pick us up and take us to Futurelink, a lot of social life happened in those in-between moments. … I have very fond memories of those moments in particular.”

Chen’s book includes drawings and writings from her childhood, as well as Futurelink dittos that already have the feel of ancient relics.

“Ever since I was a kid, we always saved everything, so I have a record of all my schoolwork, from pre-K through college,” Chen said. “Every paper I wrote, every report card—all my projects. It’s all in our family basement.”

Of course, basements can be precarious storage spaces. A few years ago, her parents’ water boiler exploded, “so all of our documents  … were basically ruined,” Chen said. “My mom spent months trying to dry everything out and preserve them. So you’ll see on some of the pages [in After School], there’s a lot of water damage.”

After School is Chen’s first book, and because she primarily works in film, photography, and collage, the book marries different artistic impulses together in a unique way.

“I have to give credit to my publisher Tim Roberts at np:,” Chen said. “He reached out to me and asked me if I had any book projects in mind … because he was starting this new initiative where he was soliciting publications that were critiquing the university system. … I thought, ‘I don’t have a project that directly critiques the university, but I have this very personal project that I haven’t really known what to do with that relates to my family’s business, and how we participated in this system of essentially upholding that high-stakes admission process.’ So it was approaching it in a more personal way. … Now that the book is out, I’ve been feeling like, well, I barely scratched surface. … It was 20 or 30 years of my life. There’s way more to talk about.”

Chen says the book started with an emphasis on her Asian American immigrant community’s anxieties about succeeding and achieving the American dream, and how that translated into a workaholic mentality.

“Then, as I was working, a lot more of the broader social, political, historical threads started to come in, post-Trump election, because I started to think about this intensification of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and how to trace it back to the Chinese-exclusion-era rhetoric,” said Chen. “One thing I worked on with the designer was how to color-code the different scraps of paper that are bound into the book. The pink scraps are speaking to more historical, archival, cultural artifacts, so then I began to interweave those into the story of Futurelink and my own personal story. It became these two parallel threads, like this sense of, what is it about America that creates this kind of hypercompetitive, workaholic behavior, and what contributes to these stereotypes of Chinese Americans or Asian Americans as machines? And how is that related to capitalist conditions in the U.S.? [The book] became about unpacking that.”

Such personal excavation can be emotionally draining, of course, so Chen also found herself creating visual art (like collages) that were a spin-off of After School. Some ended up being included in the book, but others became part of an exhibition—a portion of which will be part of the group show Wayward Images at the U-M Residential College Art Gallery, which opens March 9. (The book will be available at Schuler Books.)

And Chen isn’t the only artist in the family. Her older sister, Anelise, is an author and writing professor at Columbia University; her mother, whom Chen describes as “very, very supportive,” has a master’s degree in theater arts, in addition to having once written for a television show; and her father self-published a collection of his poetry while in his 20s.

“[My parents] have this artistic impulse themselves,” said Chen. “But when you move to America, you kind of put your own dreams on the back burner, and you start to feel like you can’t really have these dreams anymore. I guess it feels like a luxury.” 

Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music. 

The works of Angela Chen, Aaron Turner, and Ricky Weaver are showcased in the exhibit "Wayward Images" at the RC Art Gallery, 701 East University, Ann Arbor, from March 9 to April 3. There's an artist’s reception on March 27 at 4:30 pm. Admission is free for the gallery and events.