The following is Kristina Wong's foreward to the book The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice, edited by Mai-Linh K. Hong, Chrissy Yee Lau and Preeti Sharma — available at any online bookseller.

When I first started the Auntie Sewing Squad, the thinking was, When factory-made masks become readily available on the market, we will retire. What I didn’t realize then was that tens of thousands of people in America can’t access even cheap factory-made masks. Communities long forgotten by the federal government before the pandemic were now getting hit extra hard.

Never did I imagine that I would pull my mother and her friends out of retirement to order them around in my remote “sweatshop.” Never did I imagine that I would be politicizing the term sweatshop to point to the failure of the federal government in preparing us for this crisis. Never did I imagine how politically polarizing the act of wearing a mask would become. Never did I imagine how political the act of sewing two pieces of fabric together for a total stranger could be. Never did I imagine how many Aunties from all over North America would rage stitch with us.

And never did I plan for the group to make a book.

Before I became the Factory Overlord of the Auntie Sewing Squad—family, cult, labor camp, amateur medical supply company, shadow government aid agency—I was a performance artist who was scheduled to embark on a national tour of Kristina Wong for Public Office—a show 

about how I ran for and won a seat on my neighborhood council. In the “before times,” I sewed my set pieces and props. Never did I imagine that I would be using my half-assed home ec skills—previously used to stitch fabric ruffles into giant labia shapes—to make life-saving medical equipment. With used bedsheets and conference lanyards, at that.

“I’m becoming the overlord of a Chinese sweatshop,” I declared when the first volunteers to step forward were mostly Chinese and Asian American women. It wasn’t hard to see the irony of college-educated Asian American women, whose parents and grandparents did invisible, backbreaking garment labor to pay their debt to the American Dream, now performing that same work, like some kind of ancestral destiny.

This time they were doing it for no pay, and with far less appreciation from others of the time and skill that sewing requires as we’ve become a country (Amazon-)primed for instant satisfaction without consideration for the workers who make our things. And even after much American manufacturing moved to China, here we were, diasporic Asians trying to put together an ad hoc assembly line from our home sewing machines. Oh America, the land of opportunity!

No craft store, not even (f***king) Joann Fabric and Craft Stores, was prepared for the 2020 trend of sewing cloth face masks to stop the spread of COVID-19. Every vendor in the country ran out of elastic and fabric, and factory-made masks were out of stock for weeks. I was like Robinson Crusoe, and my desert island was my home in Koreatown Los Angeles, waving down every hobbyist seamstress on Facebook for leads on where to find elastic. Aunties were chopping the straps off their bras, sawing the elastic off their fitted bedsheets, knitting I-cord from scraps of yarn. No T-shirt was safe, no half-finished quilt project too  precious to sacrifice for DIY personal protective equipment.

In the early days of the pandemic (because this shit has gone on long enough for me to separate it into different eras), I was running in and out of my home ten times a day with fistfuls of elastic, meeting masked strangers to whom I had given my address on the internet because they had offered to help sew. I was buying dressmaking shops out of their stores of elastic for cash and immediately mailing spools away to strangers in other cities, even if the postage cost as much as the spools.

Some of these strangers became Aunties in our group; others, I had to trust, were going to make good on their promises to sew masks for essential workers out there, not just resell them on Etsy.

In a moment of desperation, Auntie Karen offered her son’s well-washed underwear to us for its elastic and cotton fabric. We declined, but we did consider it.

As dozens of new Aunties flooded into our group, I shifted away from my sewing machine to become an overseer, orienting new Aunties to the group. The playwright Amy Tofte, a casual rideshare acquaintance turned pandemic BFF, stepped up to get us more organized. We created a team of “Super Aunties” to identify the communities that were in real need, the ones that couldn’t wave down our help on the internet because they don’t even have internet. A few months in, the world found itself in a quadruple pandemic—health, racial, political, and economic. And the Aunties found ourselves with all the things that big organizations have—a logo, a financial sponsor, big donors, major press—but no salaries, no health benefits, no company retreat, and no end in sight.

I lean heavily into gallows humor because laughter is how I survive most things. The running joke is that I, the Overlord, will cut off the fingers and eat the babies of Aunties who don’t sew masks. We joke that we’re a cult and that this book you’re reading will be the Dianetics of sewing literature. The humor has preserved our sanity—or at least has helped us find hope in this very strange moment in history.

The great irony of this mask-making empire was that before the first Los Angeles lockdown, I refused to wear a mask. As an Asian American, I was already walking around with a mask I couldn’t take off—the mask that said to the world, “Hey, blame me for the coronavirus.” Adding a mask on top of my existing mask would bring attention that, even as a performance artist, I was not looking for.

But building ASS (which I didn’t realize was our acronym until a week after I made the Facebook group) has been a radical experiment in generosity, intersectional alliances, and a paradigm outside capitalism. I never set out to lead a remote sweatshop empire during the apocalypse, but that’s where unprecedented times take us. Like finding out that an old pillowcase can yield five face masks, we discover all sorts of things about ourselves that we didn’t know were possible.

If you’ve ever wanted to exploit unpaid manual labor, coerce children to help you, and be lauded as a hero, you have come to the right place... or at least, landed in a moment of American history where it’s become clear that we have no leadership, no supply chain, no infrastructure, and definitely no quarter-inch flat braided elastic.

If this is the end, we go down sewing. 