Psychologist and SMC professor Dorothy Chin knows all about mental health issues affecting adolescents and minority communities. After all, she’s a single mom raising twin boys and was herself an impoverished child immigrant from Hong Kong.
But the pandemic brought first-hand knowledge about something Dorothy hadn’t expected to experience: race-based trauma and post-traumatic growth.
Race-based trauma is the emotional and mental harm caused by exposure to racism or discrimination. Post-traumatic growth refers to the positive psychological changes that can occur after experiencing a traumatic event.
Covid brought Dorothy up-close-and-personal with both. As Asian Americans were widely targeted and scapegoated for the spread of the virus, she suddenly felt like hiding.
“When I walked my dog, I started to put on a hat and a mask and hope nobody would notice that I was Asian,” she says. The trauma deepened after the mass shootings of Asian Americans at a spa in Atlanta, a dance hall in Monterey Park and a farm in Half Moon Bay.
Race-based trauma drew Dorothy closer to her Asian American identity. She was interviewed for the Stanford Asian American Pacific Islander Oral History Project (opens in new window) , reflecting on her undergraduate days as a student activist. She also joined a university task force to recognize and memorialize Chinese workers (opens in new window) , whose labor on the transcontinental railroad made possible the wealth on which Stanford was founded.
She found solace in the keyboard. “I’ve always loved writing,” Dorothy says. “When I was younger, I would write a lot of op-eds. Lately it’s taken more of a creative turn.”
Last summer, Dorothy attended a two-week writing residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her first-person essays have appeared in Medium (opens in new window) , The Conversation (opens in new window) and Stanford’s alumni magazine (opens in new window) .
Post-traumatic growth also has influenced Dorothy as a scholar and educator. She recently developed a new course for SMC: Psych 33, “Stress, Trauma and Community Mental Health,” now pending approval for transfer credit.
The syllabus features Dorothy’s conceptual model of how post-traumatic growth occurs, built upon the racial-triangulation theory of UC Irvine social scientist Claire Jean Kim (opens in new window) .
“It goes beyond resilience,” she says. “It’s a process of questioning your sense of identity, which leads to greater alignment with that identity. People describe a very profound change. I myself went through it with respect to being Asian American.”
Dorothy has published three journal articles on the subject, and has two in progress. She maps out a process whereby racially traumatized people confront externally imposed stereotypes, methodically deconstruct them, and construct a more authentic identity through such outlets as storytelling, social action, visual arts and, of course, therapy.
A paper she delivered in Seattle at the American Psychological Association’s 2024 national convention expanded Dorothy’s insights to African Americans at the height of the George Floyd protests, and to Jewish Americans and Palestinian Americans since the October 7 massacre and the Israel-Hamas War.
“Dorothy’s work is truly remarkable,” says psychology professor Lisa Farwell, her longtime colleague at SMC.
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Her family history is itself a study in resilience. Dorothy’s parents emigrated from Hong Kong in 1971, when she was just 8, and settled in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Initially her mother, father and three siblings lived in a two-room tenement with only two beds. “We shared a kitchen and bathroom with another family of six down the hall,” she says.
Dorothy’s parents labored as dishwashers in a café owned by her uncle, their American sponsor. Her dad later found work as a billing clerk, while her mother continued waitressing.
"I considered us working-class,” she says, “because we worked so much, pretty much all the time.”
Dorothy remembers being bused from Chinatown to San Francisco’s Mission District, where she first encountered ethnic diversity. An outstanding student, she later was admitted to Lowell High School, the city’s revered public magnet, and attended Stanford on scholarship as a human biology major. She continued her graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Hawai’i, where she earned her PhD in 1994. She did additional graduate coursework in community psychology at New York University and a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the neuro- and psychobiology of HIV/AIDS, before joining SMC’s faculty in 1999.
She remains affiliated with UCLA as an associate research psychologist in the Center for Culture, Trauma, and Mental Health Disparities (opens in new window) , part of UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
Her role there, she says, “is very helpful in the classroom, because I am really up on the cutting-edge research before it’s published. I’m not just teaching out of the textbook.”
In addition to authoring many of the journal articles coming out of her UCLA research group, she writes a blog for Psychology Today (opens in new window) titled “A Different Lens,” focusing on mental health issues from multicultural, working-class and women-centered perspectives.
Writing for popular press, she says, “brings issues that are dear to my heart to a bigger audience.”
The audience she cares about most, however, is her students.
“I love psychology, and I love to convey enthusiasm for the field,” she says. “When I’m able to explain it, and my students get how cool it is, that’s the best feeling.”
Some are now clinical psychologists and academics. An international student from Sweden who followed Dorothy to UCLA as a lab assistant is now a psychology professor in her homeland. One past student from Israel went on to be a professor at Emory. Another student, clinical psychologist Shez Kennedy (opens in new window) , recently acknowledged Dorothy’s influence in her book (opens in new window) on communal resilience in 1960s Harlem. Several years ago, Dorothy was enchanted to find Shez’s daughter, Sydney, enrolled in her Psych 1 section. She remembers her as a little girl who sometimes accompanied mom to class.
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Dorothy’s research interests will undoubtedly continue to evolve.
A new life-change is coming her way: her twin sons Owen and Sam are now seniors at Palisades Charter High School and eagerly awaiting college admissions letters. Once they’re out of the house, Dorothy will have more time to write. She looks forward to more pool hours at the Santa Monica Swim Center and more beach volleyball matches with friends. There’ll be more time to do the other things Dorothy loves—hiking, solving New York Times crossword puzzles, going to live music events and dancing, especially disco and funk.
Will she gain new insights into the psychology of empty nesters? Stay tuned to see where life experience leads this resilient, creative and curious SMC psychology professor. Dorothy’s blog posts, magazine writing and academic journal articles are archived on her personal website (opens in new window) .
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SMC in Focus Volume XI, Issue 2
Esports Advantage
SMC’s pioneering Esports Program instills the skills needed to become industry players in this burgeoning digital media arena. Read Article
AI for Educators
A new SMC course prepares educators from all disciplines to train their students in using artificial intelligence appropriately, effectively — and ethically. Read Article
Haute-to-Go at SMC
Produced annually by SMC’s Photography & Fashion Department, the LA Mode Fashion Show of today is practically a de rigeur rite of passage for aspiring designers at the College. Read Article
When Trauma Makes You Better
For 25 years Dorothy Chin has peeled back the layers of the human psyche to curious Corsairs. Since the pandemic, she’s discovered a new layer in her own mind—and it’s a gamechanger. Read Article
Bragging Rights
The SMC Foundation organizes a multi-day distribution drive for those affected by the LA fires. A journalism instructor elected regional director for National Association of Black Journalists. Read Article
Spider-Man, the Musical?
Ye Dyke’s first audition felt like a botched tryout reel from America’s Got Talent. But this student from Myanmar—who’d never been inside a theatre—wouldn’t let a first setback get in the way. Read Article