A Problematic Party

For fifteen years, the Fox Club threw an annual Boxer Rebellion party, named after violent efforts by Chinese rebels in 1900 to drive Westerners out of China and to protect Chinese authority in the country. The parties, ostensibly in support of the Chinese rebels—who were quickly and humiliatingly crushed by united Japanese, American, and European forces—involved drinking heavily and, of course, wearing boxers. The point of the event was to skip over the time-consuming process of disrobing and start the night in bedroom apparel, the better to expedite a roll in the hay as soon as the opportunity presented itself. All’s fair in love and war.

Some students in the Asian-American community disagreed, heading into to battle against the Fox and, unexpectedly, themselves. The Asian-American Women’s Association (AAWA) was the first to take up the fight. “It’s in poor taste to make a joke or have a party about a bloody historical event, especially when it reflected their ignorance of it,” says AAWA Co-Founder and Co-President Deborah Y. Ho ’07. “They were having a party in support of the Boxers, but underneath [the main text of the invitation], they reprinted a Japanese inscription from a memorial for a group that had helped suppress the Boxers. It was really culturally mixed up.”

AAWA members discussed changing the name of the party with the Fox’s president at the time, and began contacting professors to bolster a case for racism in the Fox’s choice to name a pajama party after what Ho calls “a very very bloody, very ugly chapter in Chinese history.”

The resulting criticism of the party was more intense than it had ever been before, and that year, the Fox celebrated what may have been its last Boxer Rebellion: while no statement has yet been made to that effect, last year the party wasn’t thrown, and Ho doesn’t think they’ll have it again. However, the attitude of the Harvard community as a whole—including some members of the Asian-American community—toward AAWA’s work was less than supportive.

“One of the arguments we got was, ‘We’ve had the party for the last fourteen years, and nobody had a problem then,’ and I think that sentiment is part of the problem,” Ho says. “The impression is that past silence means it’s okay.” Harvard’s Asian-American community in general, to the dismay of many leaders within it, has historically been slow to anger and reluctant to speak out against perceived injustices.

The Boxer Rebellion affair is symptomatic of a greater issue: when dealing with racism that takes more subtle forms than threats of violence or ethnic slurs, as Ho puts it, “You find yourself in this gray area, where the question is, is this a big enough deal for me to make a ruckus about it? When the minority group in question can’t agree if they’re being offended, why’s anyone else going to care?”