Why Asian America

I.

College is a torrent of sensation. And it is never static. One moment may be of euphoria – another, of frustration and doubt. Most often, however, we find ourselves somewhere in between these extremes: elated and exhausted, cheerful but grave.

College is also a time and place of self-discovery and growth. Through the trials and rigors of balancing an overwhelmed schedule of studies, extracurriculars, work, friendships, life-planning – we come to new insights about both ourselves and the world around us. As a senior soon to embark into post-college existence, I have spent much time reflecting on my past four years and charting my self-development throughout. I remember the gray April chill of my first visit to Ann Arbor and how I hated its dreariness compared to my hometown of Tucson, Arizona. I remember the awkward, vain attempts to redefine myself in this new place, one where the burdens of my past were unknown and unimportant. I remember the haunting hollowness I felt during my initial months, at how strangely detached I was when everyone else seemed to just “get it.” As a matter of personal taste, I am not interested in professional sports or big, raucous parties with drunken bodies milling about – and even if I pretended to care about them I always walked away by the end of the night both empty and dissatisfied. In a way I was a shell of a being, and I still remember the loneliness of coming back to my quiet Mosher Jordan dorm, blinded by the sterile, searing fluorescent lighting, and feeling as if my childish, overblown expectations at a new college self – strong, social, outspoken – were just that. Childish and overblown.

I also remember the early days of sophomore year, when I finally decided to do something about it.

Initially I returned to campus very zealous and ambitious. I felt that my first year was complacent and meek, and I pushed myself very little – at most a halfhearted nudge – to seek new things and experiences. So I went out to a number of organizations, each with different focuses (though they were mostly political and always left). Yet throughout my hunt I never discovered anything which spurred the unique combination of interests I had. With every organization there seemed to exist a gaping hole where my passions would have laid. And when I did muster up the courage to finally attend an Asian American organization – tepidly embracing an identity of mine that for so long had been disparaged and insulted – I faced the greatest disappointment yet. I recall walking out of a United Asian American Organizations mass meeting, talking to my friend who came along and swearing at how angry I was that a group claiming to represent the community was simply social and basically selling out. And this futile search continued until the mass meetings ended, flyers trickled to nothing, and I ended up at the beginning.

This changed one October afternoon. I sat at the computers on the second floor of Hatcher, coming out from a long reading session in the Reference Room. What my eyes stumbled upon this time, however, was an email which described a Daily article that day concerning a hate crime committed against Asian Americans on campus. I immediately felt a surge of both disgust and affirmation – feelings which stemmed from the years of a collective build-up of suspicion and unconscious reflection on an identity that had always been imposed on me. Growing up during my pivotal years of middle and high school in Tucson did not provide a place to foster ethnic identity, especially in the wealthier (and thereby isolated) northern foothills of the city. My Asian-ness – the American name had yet to appear – was always a salient marker of difference that I carried around with me in every situation. Now, we are all different from one another, inside and out, ranging from the clothes we wear to the size of blood cells flowing in our veins. Yet the difference represented by the term Asian was more fundamental and profound than our preferred brands of clothing or the music we enjoy. My experience was and has been prominently defined by this racial difference, whether I like it or not, and as I ran (literally) to the first place I knew would have a copy of the Daily that day, I was taking the first step to embrace this identity of mine.

I came upon a stack of newspapers in the lobby of Hatcher and began reading nervously. My mind traced the incident, its often vague details, the diluted response by the police and University. Through my anger and trembling fingers, however, I felt various threads of my life slowly tying together. I began feeling justified for the awkward and sometimes painful experiences that had burdened my racial identity. The hate crime symbolized to me the nexus of my – and my people’s – inexpressible inabilities at times to fit in, feelings of estrangement from situations local and in the broader American community. Simply put, things began making sense. And as I found myself back in the Yuri Kochiyama lounge, discussing these issues of Asian America which my subconscious obsessed over – but I never had the courage to admit to care about – I finally discovered that splendid, wonderful something I had long been searching for: Community, strong and vibrant.

Yet as Asian Americans and people of color, discovering a community requires intrepid work and courage. It is a burden we face, for our community is not handed to us, especially not by society – in fact, prevailing social discourse actually stigmatizes Asian American and people of color activism and frames it as unnecessary, trouble-making, illegitimate, or silly. But there would be no America had its peoples not agitated and struggled – had women simply stood by as their gender was objectified and exploited, had blacks acquiesced to their dehumanizing state of chattel slavery and institutionalized segregation, had Native Americans or Chicanos let their lands be overrun and accept it as a fact of nature. Only we, as the bearers of our unique identity, have the responsibility to embrace and empower ourselves along these lines. Otherwise no one will.

Identity, however, is complicated, and we sometimes possess ones that overlap, conflict, or flat out contradict one another. One individual may be a Democrat, soccer fan, professor of anthropology, mother of three, Vietnamese American, lesbian, and an avid swimmer. But we cannot mire ourselves in every complexity of the individual self – not only is that task much too daunting, it is also to overlook one important fact of human existence: we after all are not islands. We are social beings operating in a system of prevailing norms, values, and histories. These social spaces then prioritize or highlight various identities over others – and these social identities serve as rigid, definitive categories of our individual selves: race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, etc. Although basically speaking they are indeed socially constructed to a degree, this does not make them any less real. Money and marriage, for example, are also social constructions, yet they also function as provocative determinants of society and our existence.

So this discussion forces us to invariably ask two fundamental questions: 1) Why do we come together as Asian Americans? 2) What is Asian American identity in the first place? I see these questions as necessary if we are to survive and progress as a community, since they often go unevaluated in much of Asian American activism despite their significance for the existence of such a movement in the first place. In our investigation, however, we are constrained by the nature of racial identity itself – that is, we can never essentialize or proclaim to define what one identity is. This desire to cleanly locate one social group in exclusion of others is wrong on two counts: it not only plays into the discriminatory history of racial discourse, it also seeks to erect barriers where there can be none. Identities are fluid, two-way transactions, and they interact in many interesting ways with one another. For instance, individuals of “mixed” background claim unique racial identities which do not fit the standard American ethno-racial pentagon of black, brown, white, red, and yellow. Some individuals can also “belong” to one race, but pass for another. And race is extremely contingent what about peoples who by definition do not fit cleanly? Filipinos presented unique racial cases for American law, as they did not fit with the standard “Mongolian” designation given to all previous Asian immigrants.

What we can do is to be contingent and critical in our evaluation. To discuss an identity and recognize its ever-changing, amorphous nature are compatible principles, and it requires any rigorous reflection to keep both in mind at all times. Also, to dispel fears of speculation in a project like this, racial identities and their social meaning are in fact quite tangible and definitive, even though they are also muddled and confused. Racial identity is, after all, founded on the solid bedrock of public discourse – and the reason why it “makes sense” when television shows broadcast stereotypes of this or that racial group is because the concept of racial difference is built into American culture itself. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle presents an accessible symbol of the prevailing nature of racial identities and stereotypes, since we would not understand the film’s motif of toying with racial identity were we not in tune with the social meanings of “Indian,” “Korean,” and “Asian” alike.

This reflection will be continued in the following post.


:exl

Who Are Those Ants? And Who Am I?

When I was having lunch on the top of Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire this summer, two greedy ants, like two vicious blood-sucking leeches climbing up and down my unfinished sandwich. They are too ignorant to know that buns, turkey, honey-mustard, cheese and jelly are not free commodities; they are not free public school system; they are not social welfares in black neighborhoods; they belong to me, my sandwich, carrots, apple and water. All of them belong to me. So I deport those two illegal intruders from my territory and mercilessly kill them with my unquestionable power and authority.

“Who are those ants? And who am I”

I don’t know the answer to such a complex question. I try to ask God, but it does not want to answer me, because I am an atheist and my cousin and I play Chinese chess the last time we went to church ten years ago.

So I ask the mountain right across from my blurring sight. The mountain seems to be old and firm, and somehow wise. I may have offended his intelligence and age.

I hate ants. They are all over me now, on the top of my red Coca Cola can, on the surface of my transparent lunch zipper bag, between my bare toes, even on my crumbled journal pages. They are unlawful intruders. They are fucking everywhere, in nail salons, in doughnut shops, in hospitals, in engineering companies, in restaurant dishwashing room, taking over UCLA, taking over American colleges, taking over all of our jobs… It is a fucking invasion.

God suddenly speaks to me from the opaque sky. “You selfish son of a bitch. Could you leave just a bit of cheese for the ants to provide them a decent family dinner? To get them through another cold, cold Christmas night.”

George Dong

UAAO Supporting Columbia University Hunger Strikers

The United Asian American Organizations (UAAO) at the University of Michigan stands in full solidarity with the hunger strikers at Columbia University. UAAO is a political coalition of 37 Asian American student groups, established to work in unity to provide education on issues facing Asian/Pacific Islander Americans, to promote awareness of Asian/Pacific Islander American cultures, and to serve as a communication core for Asian/Pacific Islander American organizations and individuals.

Since the founding of the first Ethnic Studies programs in late 1960s and on, faculty and students have continuously faced institutional challenges. We struggle to uphold the principles Ethnic Studies was founded on, the right to education, to redirect resources at higher education institution to our communities, and to connect with the grassroots movements. We have received backlashes at traditional, elite institutions. Our Studies has become inaccessible and academic because of the traditional framework of higher education. Our services to our communities are not valued, quantified or qualified for the “standards,” made by people who intend to shake our beliefs, who want us to abandon the movements that have preceded us and will come after us.

As students of color in Michigan, we share the same struggles as students at Columbia University. Our faculty of color, not only in Ethnic Studies but across in various departments and disciplines, are being let go one by one. The same reasons are told to us each time we request an explanation: the faculty member’s research is not qualified, given the context of the prestigious research institution; their work focuses on the community, not on research that allows the university to continuously be perceived prestigiously; their research only concerns a small minority group, not the society at large. These reasons only raise more questions: Who are the people who set the standards? Who decide what is prestigious and what is not? And furthermore, why should one be punished, not rewarded, for spending tremendous amount of time and effort in the community, outside of one’s research facility?

The colonialism existing in the traditional academia framework greatly hurts students. If Columbia University claims to embrace diversity and freedom, then the diversity cannot be validated solely by having students of color on campus. The administration needs to recognize that diversity goes beyond numbers and community input is crucial in improving campus climate. The curriculum needs to be diversified, allowing knowledge in different fields, including Ethnic Studies, which promotes knowledge that has been traditionally suppressed because of colonialism. Students have the right to learn about the history and importance of people of color in building this country, founded on colonial principles. Students have the right to demand the university’s support for acquiring such knowledge, if the university truly embraces diversity.

United Asian American Organizations Board
Eric Li, Co-Chair
C.C. Song, Co-Chair
Anisha Mangalick, Advocacy
George Dong, Community Historian
Katherine Takai, External Relations
Ashley Manzano, Internal Relations
Jeff Meng, Finance
Vivian Tao, Programming
Ravi Bodepudi, Service

Welcome to UAAO's official blog!

One of the few things that annoy me about UAAO's website is our "past activism" section, which ended in 2003, with the establishment of the Asian/Pacific Islander American minor. So... is that it? What happened when I got to college in 2004? For someone who wasn't involved at all until the second year of college, I've always wanted to find out what happened between 2004 and 2005. But what about for people who came after me? The history I know in 2005, 2006, and 2007, will be lost without some sort of documentation.

Aside from documenting major actions in the community, the blog will also serve as a forum for issue and current event-based discussions. We could've simply send out a "UAAO Current Event" email to our listserv, and you could choose to either read through the whole thing or delete it upon the email's arrival, but we feel the content of those emails deserves more than just a glance. Think about it this way, if someone asks me what is my vision for UAAO, for the Asian American community in Michigan, or for the whole Asian America, would I be able to answer those questions in one glance? Certainly not.

UAAO board members will be posting regularly, but we definitely welcome any submissions and suggestions for the blog. Someone mentions that posting our weekly meeting's topic would be helpful, and we'll try our best to do that. Please email us at uaao.board@umich.edu if you'd like to submit a post or have questions about us.

A new post will be up soon!

C.C.
UAAO Co-chair 2007-2008