Asides from the fact that I drink a lot of boba, I generally do not take the time to familiarize myself with the Taiwanese American community.
Which is why I was slightly nervous when the president of the Taiwanese American Union asked me and several other people involved in Asian American organizations on campus to help out as student conference leaders for the Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Student Association (ITASA) that was held at UCLA several weekends ago.
Essentially, the purpose of a student conference leader is to be responsible for a small group of Taiwanese American high school and college students in the gaps of time between conference events and lectures, with responsibilities that range from leading goofy icebreaker activities to facilitating group discussions on hate crimes within the AA community.
While the majority of the student conference leaders were obviously Taiwanese American, there were also Japanese Americans like me, Vietnamese Americans, Chinese Americans, Indian Americans and other non-Taiwanese people who volunteered a good chunk of their weekend to help out with the conference.
I guess in the end, it didn't matter that we weren't Taiwanese American and were not intimately acquainted with the politics that affect the Taiwanese people, such as the clash between those who want reunification with the mainland and those who want to create an independent Taiwanese republic.
It didn't matter because while our cultures and histories are very different, we empathized with their desire to define themselves as a growing immigrant community and to become more politically active in the larger sphere of mainstream America.
The more I think about it, the presence of other minorities within minority-specific organizations is not a very unusual around here. In our Nikkei Student Union, for example, many group members are not JA even though they actively participate in Little Tokyo community events, take on big leadership positions or help plan the annual Nikkei Student Union Cultural Night.
Even within the AA theater group that I am a part of, Caucasians, black-Hispanic and half-Moroccan people are strongly involved within the organization for a mutual passion for acting and performing.
Perhaps this is an important point to make here. Struggles for ethnic communities shouldn't be thought in such insular terms JAs represent JA issues, Chinese Americans represent Chinese American issues, and so on. Doing so completely ignores the hyphenated American that comes with being a minority in this country and fails to acknowledge that we are all communities intimately connected together within a much larger community.
Yuri Kochiyama got the point when she got heavily involved with the black civil rights movement in the 1960s. She understood that it wasn't just a black struggle, but a struggle for all oppressed minorities everywhere. Thusly, a step up in the black community meant a step up for everybody else.
This is why AAs should be aware of the immigrant rights movement that is taking place right now because while it largely affects the Latino community, it also deeply involves the Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and other undocumented Asian immigrants who are working hard to make a living in this country.
It doesn't have to be this serious all the time, though. Sometimes being involved with another community can just be a matter of expanding your horizons and having fun.
By being a student conference leader for a Taiwanese American student conference, I not only learned a great deal about the Taiwanese American community, I also got to watch a Taiwanese puppet show, get to know a lot of cool Taiwanese American college students, and have hook-ups with free, delicious Taiwanese food.
Now how sweet is that?
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