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20 people attended the house party in Austin at the home of Ramey Ko and Rick Cofer, including Kurt Kuhn, candidate for the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals; Amy Wong Mok, Director of the Austin Asian American Cultural Center; Madeline Hsu, Director of the University of Texas at Austin Center for Asian American Studies; Masashi Niwano, Executive Director of the Austin Asian American Film Festival, and local author, Irwin Tang.
Top 3 issues facing the AAPI community as discussed by William Liu and Irwin Tang:
During the semi-discussion period at the end of the get-together, we spoke about whether Asian American issues were really present and being dealt with the current administration.
I think Asian Americans struggle with defining a unified coalition among the many Asian, Desi, and Pacific Islander American ethnic communities. Furthermore, it remains difficult for us as a community to come together and recognize a collective goal for Asian Americans.
Part of the reason for this is the relative newness of our community - a growing proportion of Asian Americans are immigrants - which tends to produce ethnic enclaves and strong ethnic communities. Another part is the immigrant community itself, which has had to deal with difficult nationalization processes and struggle with the reconciliation of multiple cultural identities.
I think that as a first step, the video conference was a good beginning point to address APIDA issues, but I think in order for the Asian American community to be engaged, there needs to be continued dialogue not just with the English-speaking Asian Americans but also Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, and other language-speaking Asian Americans.
I think that one major silent struggle for APAs really is the plight of convenience store owners and small retail business owners, clerks, and workers (including taxi drivers) who are shot to death or maimed at an alarming rate.
There is a lot of progress that can be made on this issue, including through symbolic measures, as these Asians are viewed often by communities as bloodsuckers. But also through worker/owner education, gun control, police cooperation, etc. Gordon Quan knows a lot about this.
Second, bullying, racism and administrative mistreatment are major issues for APAs in public and private schools. Damaged adults and angry violent people are produced every year through the crucible of our school systems. Parents must move their families not only for better schools but for better environments. And school admin's often do not really understand the problems of these kids and do not have time to deal with them, and sometimes punish them inadvertantly.
The underground labor market and systems of human trafficking represent the places where some of the greatest suffering is going on among Asians in America. These include the systems of low-wage workers imported from China and Asian women and girls tricked into prostitution and sex slavery (who must be distinguished from women who voluntarily immigrate or game the system themselves to work in the sex industry). Exploitation and ignorance of rights and resources are major issues therein.
It's amazing that there is even such a dialogue and that some of this might filter back to the Obama Administration.
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