#ElectAAPIs: A Conversation with Michelle Au
Elected in 2020, Michelle Au is the first Asian American woman elected to the Georgia Senate. Before coming into Congress, she was working as an anesthesiologist at Emory-St. Joseph’s Hospital, helping to better the health of her patients. It was there that she developed for politics as she understood its direct impact on citizens’ healthcare and other far reaching effects. Her election spotlighted an important shift in Georgia politics where previously staunchly conservative areas were moving towards the left. Lately, she’s been hard at work protecting the voting rights of numerous vulnerable citizens in Georgia and standing up and actively legislating against AAPI hate.
When and why did you decide to run for office? Was there a specific experience or moment that inspired you?
I think the one thing my path to the Georgia General Assembly has taught me is that life is non-linear. And while this may be obvious to most of you already, I only note this because for many physicians and maybe many lawyers or other peri-academic fields, much of our path to reaching our primary professions has been a Point A to Point B to Point C sort of story.
I became a doctor because I wanted to help people, and I wanted to fix difficult problems. But one thing you realize fairly early on in your medical career is that many of the things that make our patients sick in the first place are actually far outside our ability to address at the bedside.
That in a sense, by the time our patients get to us at the hospital — if they can get to us at all — it’s too late. And I found that very frustrating.
So what I decided to do about it — and this was about a decade out from finishing my residency — was to go back to school and get a Masters degree in Public Health. This was in 2016.
Public health, I figured, was a way to address the upstream issues that made not just individual patients, but whole communities, whole populations, healthier.
Public health deals not just with the close-up aspects of healthcare — health insurance, medicines, interventions, treatments, that kind of thing — but broader social determinants of health.
These are things like healthcare access more broadly, access to quality education, economic opportunity, public safety, racial equity. All these things have far more effect on population health than anything any of us can do at the bedside, as hard as it is to admit, as someone who actually practices bedside medicine.
My background in public health is what made me realize fully that the upstream way to address issues in our healthcare system — not just the way things work, but the way things are broken — is through healthcare policy. And it made me realize that legislative action is the true lever arm of improving community health overall.
As the first Asian American woman elected to a Georgia Senate seat, what do you think is the importance of diverse voices in our state government?
I live in Senate District 48, in the suburbs north of metro Atlanta, and it’s one of the most diverse districts in the state. In particular, it has a very high AAPI population — almost 25% as of the 2010 census, and almost certainly higher now. And in talking with members of my community, I got the strong sense that people were hungry for representation that reflected the full diversity of our community.
It’s no secret that AAPIs are underrepresented in government and politics, and this is particularly true in state and local legislatures. That’s the kind of change that needs to happen one candidate at a time, and I wanted to be part of that change.
Despite usually overwhelmingly voting for Democratic candidates, Asian Americans have often been overlooked by campaigns and political pundits. What do you think campaigns can do to better include the AAPI community and improve their turnout in elections?
Asians are the fastest growing racial group in the country, and as such, the AAPI community is rapidly gaining power as a formidable voting bloc that wields significant power.
Of course, calling Asians a “voting bloc” again does a disservice, because as we know, not all Asians vote a specific way. But regardless of politics, Asian voices and influence are being seriously considered in electoral politics, hinging on the assumption that Asian voters are turning out at the ballot box.
To specifically reach Asian voters and make sure that their votes are counted, we have to understand the barriers to turnout.
First, again, is this understanding that Asian voters are not monolithic. There are cultural, language, socioeconomic, and geographical variations that can have a huge effect on turnout, and this doesn’t only affect reaching voters, this affects voter engagement, and getting people to feel like there’s a reason for them to care about elections, period.
Things like language and translation assistance, and cultural outreach are important, of course, but also things like polling and analysis of different groups to see what issues they care about most.
This leads to the observation that campaigns need to prioritize Asian American outreach in elections. People vote when they feel engaged in the process, and unless we invest in that engagement, via phone-banking, canvassing, translating campaign materials, or allying with Asian community leaders, we can’t expect communities to invest in us.
Finally, we need to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing. I think few people would deny publicly that exercising the right to vote is the right thing to do. Some people may show that they feel that in their actions — or at least show that they only care about certain types of votes — but generally speaking, we agree that the more people who participate in our democracy, the stronger it is.
We need to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing. This includes removing barriers to voter registration, including voter purging tactics that selectively disadvantage voters with non-white or transliterated names. It also includes abandoning unjust voter identification practices, which, again, tend to selectively discriminate against immigrants.
A state government’s inability to accommodate different communities should not translate in the infringement on that community’s ability to vote.
What are some of the most memorable moments of your time as a state senator so far?
Two moments stand out in my mind in particular, and they’re not the ones that you might think. Obviously one wants to think that being sworn in for the first time is a memorable moment, but our swearing in was a bit anticlimactic, given COVID conditions. Though we got to pose for some photos afterwards, we weren’t allowed to have family in the chamber while we were actually swearing in, and it does sadden me that I wasn’t allowed to have my parents fly into town for the ceremony, because I think they would have gotten a kick out of it.
My moments are a little more reflective, and smaller. One moment I remember in particular was walking through the Senate anteroom between votes. This anteroom is a small, sort of clubby room off to the side of the Senate chamber, filled with exactly what you’d expect. Wood paneled walls, tufted leather furniture, coffee, some snacks. It’s a place where people sit, have conversations, take calls, what have you. And the walls of this room are lined with what I like to think of as “yearbook photos” of decades of past legislators, dating all the way back to the 1960s.
I love looking at old photos, and in particular I loved looking at the way the legislature changed over time, and the way that, as we get closer to the present day, we started to see more women, and more people of color serving, and of course I love to see the faces of people whom I know and serve with now, back when they were first-year legislators like me. But one thing that really jumped out to me — and I think that this is a common experience for many minorities — is how obvious it was that there were no faces that looked like mine lining the walls of this room. I’m the first Asian woman to serve in the Georgia Senate, and I really feel that acutely every day, and in this room, I could see that very visibly. So that awareness is something I remember very vividly in my first year.
The other memorable moments have to do with the progress of my first bill, Senate Bill 82, which is a bill that would seek to eliminate insurance companies retroactively rejecting healthcare claims for patients presenting to hospital emergency rooms. This is a bill and an issue that, as a physician, is quite personal to me and many of the people I take care of, and every step of this bill’s progress through first the Senate, and then the House, was an incredible learning experience for me. Like they say, you never forget your first. And I look forward to ushering SB 82 over the finish line next session and having the governor sign it into law, so that patients requiring emergency medical evaluation and care can be taken care of without unfairly shouldering a financial burden that they should never have to face.
Today, many young activists are disillusioned with electoral politics as the change they see from politicians seems incremental and insufficient. What is your message to these young people, and what do you think is the importance of voting and volunteering for campaigns, in addition to grassroots community, organizing, protesting, etc.?
I absolutely understand the frustration that many activists, in particular our younger activists, have with the pace of our electoral system. Because the changes that many of us see needing to be made in our society are not small changes — they are fundamental, sweeping changes, and the rate of the change we’re able to push forward, if we can even push change at all, seems utterly insufficient to deal with the problems at hand. And that can lead to a lot of hopelessness, and cynicism, and push people away from this kind of work.
I don’t have a perfect answer to this question, because it’s something I deal with myself every day. However, I will make one point and also give one piece of advice.
First, the advice, which is: don’t be a cynic. Don’t forget what brought you here in the first place. Cynicism is a protective mechanism in a sense, in that it insures you against frustration, or disappointment, because you can tell yourself that you never really thought that change was possible. But don’t be that person. Idealism is not a weakness. And it’s a gift, often possessed by younger people, and you should hold onto that gift as long as you possibly can, because it will drive you forward even when things get hard.
And the second point, which should help enable you to take the advice, is that incrementalism can still be part of larger change. We see this all the time, and we’ve seen this right here in Georgia. Just because change happens bit by bit doesn’t mean it doesn’t add up until it reaches a tipping point. Just look at the results of the 2020 election, and the fact that Georgia flipped blue, first in the Presidential, and then in the Senate runoffs. That kind of change doesn’t happen all of a sudden. It was the result of years, and decades, of excruciatingly slow work, and organizing, and effort, bit by bit, one voter at a time.
Change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden. So don’t get frustrated, don’t get cynical, and keep going.
What advice would you give to AAPI youth who want to be involved in politics, either in local elections or on the national stage?
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are dramatically underrepresented in elected office and particularly in the criminal justice sector — even though we’re the fastest growing demographic group in this country.
And there is a big disparity. Although we make up more than 6% of the population of this country, we make up less than 1% of elected officials, and this is even more pronounced the more local you get — for example, state and municipal legislatures.
Running for office might not be for everyone, I don’t want to soft-peddle that. I don’t think people should run just to get our numbers up, that’s not the point.
But I don’t want it to be that people who could run, might want to run, might be incredible at serving in public office — don’t even consider it, because they’ve never seen any proof that they can.
In every space, someone has to go first. So why not you?
And I think that all of us on this call today feel that incredible responsibility to not just represent ourselves, and our communities, but also to make space in the rooms others like us might not have been aware had doors open.
So look and see where your passion lies. Look for fixable problems that you can help solve. And if that path leads you towards public office, don’t count yourself out.
The Young Politicasian is a project of the High School Democrats of America Asian American Pacific Islander Caucus. Follow us on Instagram @hsda_aapi, join the caucus, and apply to be a staff writer. The opinions expressed in The Young Politicasian do not necessarily reflect those of the AAPI Caucus or the High School Democrats of America.
