This Year, APA Heritage Month May Be Overshadowed by Olympic Controversies
While students continue to celebrate, what happens to APA identity when the 'home country' is the target of criticism?
Every April, the University of Virginia buzzes with Asian Pacific American activities. Judo performances take over the lawn and cultural festivals give way to Vietnamese noodle slurping during "PhoFest."
It's all for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, which is nationally recognized in May but celebrated on most college campuses in April. This year Grace Jin Park, 20, wanted to do something different with her sisters at alpha Kappa Delta Phi (aKDPhi), a national APA interest sorority. They had already rolled sushi to feed hundreds of hungry students, so for another event spotlighting APA women, Park invited the co-founder of a non-profit organization that helps build schools in Tibet to speak to her peers.
The April 15 event came on the heels of larger national events - the controversial Olympic Torch relay in San Francisco and protests in Tibet. Although Park and aKDPhi started planning it well before last month's headline-grabbing controversies, the timing propelled them into a dialogue about national identity.
"Overall, I really thought it was imperative that as Asian Americans we know our own culture but also those we may know less about," said Park, a biological engineering major and aKDPhi cultural chair who worried about how the recent fallout between Tibet and China would affect their event.
And there were plenty of reasons to be concerned, especially since protests of the upcoming Beijing Olympics have stirred national pride and alarming reactions on other campuses like Duke University - where aKDPhi's Tibet speaker Losang Rabgey had to cancel a scheduled appearance after student Grace Wang was labeled a traitor for trying to mediate an on-campus China protest.
A storm was brewing at the University of Virginia too. A pro-Tibet column in the student newspaper launched angry Facebook.com groups, so hours before the aKDPhi event, Rabgey called Park to ask if there were any protesters carrying signs or flags on campus.
"Thankfully, nothing happened," said Park. But then again, something did happen - three months before the Beijing Olympics, all eyes are on China - and there's no room to stay neutral in the political debate. So in a month that celebrates APA history and culture, how does all the attention over China's "image problem" affect young APAs trying to celebrate their own identities?
Conflicted Nationalism
In August, China will be the center of the world's attention as the backdrop for the Olympic Games. It is only the third Asian country to host the games behind Japan and South Korea. Although many APAs have expressed pride, many also feel conflicted. Especially since all the pomp and circumstance that come with the Olympic Games has been met every step of the way with harsh criticism.
The country known as the "Land of the Sleeping Dragon," has long been a target of criticism for its political and human rights related issues, but the barrage of news about last year's tainted consumer products and increased attention on China and Tibet relations have opened up more opportunities for fervent protest. Even China's Olympic float in the famous New Year's Day Rose Parade was met with protesters in Pasadena, Calif.
Not to mention China's reported role as a top trading partner and a major weapons supplier to the government in Sudan, which experts say has fueled a conflict that has killed about 200,000 people in the Darfur region.
What happens to APA self-identity when their "home country" is the target of criticism similar to Japanese Americans during World War II?
"When people ask me how I feel about the Chinese government, I will be honest - I don't agree with many of the policies of the Chinese government," said Ziwei Hu, a 21-year-old international political economy major at the University of California, Berkeley. "I know that corruption is still a huge problem, and that there's an absence of the rule of law."
Hu was born in California to parents who grew up in Mainland China learning to dislike Communist Party rule during the Cultural Revolution, but they still taught their daughter to love the country.
During past Olympic competitions, her family always cheered for the Chinese teams over the American teams even though they were all U.S. citizens, she said.
"They looked like us [and] they had names like us."
Over the years, Hu started identifying more with the APA community and seeing more problems with the country's policies on democracy and human rights. Now, she is interning with an organization that helps Tibetans seek political asylum in the U.S.
This summer, Hu will be cheering for American teams.
"I am still proud to be Chinese - there's such a rich cultural heritage that comes with being Chinese - but I don't think the current regime in China reflects what it means to be Chinese. Maybe some people would think that makes me less Chinese, and perhaps they're correct, because I did grow up in America. And because of this background, I feel strongly about democracy and human rights, and I guess that outweighs any nationalist pride I have."
Are We Uninformed?
"I think the times are different because people feel more comfortable with their own identities and make a distinction between being Asian and being Asian American," said Naomi Oren, a senior art history major and Chinese minor at UC Berkeley.
Oren studied abroad at the New School of Collaborative Learning, a small international school in the suburbs of Beijing.
"Living in China and seeing it grow to what it is today helped me realize how much I do have in the States, such as a freer access to information and freer press," she said. "I know that there are many people who feel that the Olympics is the chance to prove China can compete economically on a global scale.
"But I also know some people who are Chinese American who believe that, okay, so the Olympics shouldn't be boycotted but China has some serious civil rights issues to deal with and the protesting is good because it puts the Chinese government to shame when it needs to shine."
But even with growing anti-Chinese sentiment - evident in the continued protest in almost every leg of the Olympic Torch relay - and growing media coverage of these events, APA Heritage Month cultural events continue in many U.S. college campuses with barely a mention of the controversies or its long histories.
It's because most young APAs are uninformed, said Eming Piansay, a senior at San Francisco State University majoring in journalism.
The first she ever learned about Tibet was in the 1997 movie "Seven Years in Tibet," she admitted in a blog entry for New America Media. Yes, Brad Pitt was her world history professor because China-Tibet relations were never a focus of her formal education.
Last month Piansay, 22, stumbled upon a downtown San Francisco silent protest against China. Instead of the traditional protest method of gathering and shouting, opponents of China's human rights policies let photos of alleged victims tell their stories. Piansay had to look away from the gruesome photos of burns and wounds.
"I am very far from being a historical expert when it comes to international conflict. But I think as a young person who is unfamiliar with this particular part in history, it gave me a sense of how important the Olympics taking place in China has affected people so many people enough to come out, and post these photos which I thought were really disturbing."
Piansay sees a potential for more tension as the Olympics draw closer. But if anything, she argued, the controversy is forcing young Americans to pay attention to issues that they didn't learn in their U.S. history books.
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