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Gasson Hall became a hub of activity Friday night as the opening ceremony for the Third Annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month sought to bring new meaning to the word "Asian-American" for the Boston College community.
The theme for this year's celebration was "expressing identity through art," a theme highlighted by the keynote speaker, Arar Han, co-editor of Asian American X and BC '03.
In her speech, Han addressed many of the issues facing young Asian-Americans in the contemporary United States. She began by describing an incident she believed to be common among most Asian Americans.
"[She is] sitting on the exit aisle of the plane between two white men. The steward comes over and asks the standard question of 'Will all of you be able to open the exit door if there were to be an emergency?' and right after this asks, 'Can everyone here understand English?' while directly looking at [Han]," she said.
Asians, according to Han, are still being typecast into quaint little catchphrases, slogans, and commercial pieces of art in modern U.S. catchphrases and slogans like 'All Asians are nerds' or 'A Chinese man works twice as fast for half the pay.' In addition, she said seemingly innocent questions and comments also show how white people view Asians today.
Questions like, "What are you?" and comments like, "You speak English really well" are simply an understated manner of putting Asians in an inferior class.
Everything isn't all subtle, said Han. Han offered a recent example of the tsunami song, played by New York radio station Hot 97, which parodied the natural disaster that killed millions of people.
In the song, words like "chink" are used to describe the people who died and God is depicted as a racist.
After Han's speech, people broke up into small groups to discuss certain excerpts from the book and how they felt about the issues surrounding it. One of the excerpts was an essay called, "A little too much Asian and not enough white."
The young man who wrote it is a Korean adoptee, raised by German American parents who felt that he needed to be heard out. He talked about how "[he was] white in every aspect of his life besides his facial features and skin tone" and how people would never truly see him as an American, rather, he would always be Asian.
Several students shared their childhood experiences growing up nonwhite in a predominantly white neighborhood.
"I was pretty much 'the diversity' in my kindergarten class but I didn't really see the difference when I was at that age, but in grade school, things became pretty apparent," said Danielle Cardona, A&S '05, who grew up in Maine. "The worst experience I had was when someone came up to me in school, called me a nigger, and I didn't even know what that meant in first grade."
Gina Kim, A&S '07, who grew up in Atlanta, said having white and Asian friends often got competitive, and her loyalties were questioned.
"When I was in middle school, there weren't a lot of Asian kids but at one point, districts changed and suddenly, all these Asians from the next district were in my school," she said. "My white friends then started saying things like 'Oh, you're so busy now hanging out with your Asian friends' while the Asian kids slipped snide notes in my locker calling me a twinkie."
The month is an effort to increase awareness of the Asian American identity, said Romeo Ymalay III, APAHM Committee head of public relations and A&S '06.
"We believe that this will be a way for people to realize that we aren't foreigners, and that we do have a history in America, and just like them, we are simply Americans, and not Asian Americans," he said.
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