APA in Wichita, Kansas, House Party, May 2, 2010                   

Submitted by Doris T. Chang            

This is the first House Party held at Wichita. Locally, it is sponsored by the Center for Women’s Studies and the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs at Wichita State University.  There were 11 participants.  Among the participants are U.S citizens of diverse national origins—India, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Half of the participants are immigrants; half are U. S. born.

Our group discussions after the conference call are as follows: 

Due to the diversity of Asians/Asian Americans in Wichita, each nationality has its own respective ethnic organization that doesn’t communicate with each other on a regular basis.  Like other Asian communities nationwide, this fragmentation presents a challenge to the Asian-American community in Wichita.  Unlike Hispanics and Blacks, Asians in the U.S do not share a common language and culture.

Under the leadership of James Ho, a Chinese American immigrant from Taiwan, the annual Asian Festival and Indo-Chinese Center were established with the mission of promoting the Pan-Asian identity in Wichita.  Since the early 1980s, the Wichita Asian Festival stands as one of the longest continuous Asian Festival in the U.S. As an annual event that showcases Wichita’s Asian communities to the larger community, it features a night of ethnic foods, dances, handicrafts, and information booths representing diverse nationalities of Asians in Wichita.  Marina  Buan, the current president of Wichita Asian Association (WAA), mentioned that the main task of WAA is to coordinate the annual Asian Festival to educate the Wichita public about Asian cultures. Under the leadership of Mohan Kambampati, the mission of the Wichita Indo-Chinese Center (ICC) is to provide English as a Second Language instruction to newly arrived Asian immigrants. In order to fund the annual Asian Festival and maintain the ICC, both WAA and ICC have shared the grants and donations that both non-profit organizations received from the Wichita Business community, private individuals, and other financial sources.  In order to ensure the financial contributions of donors and grants, it is important that the ICC and WAA remain non-partisan in politics.  Because most Asian immigrants in Wichita are either apolitical or are evenly divided along the lines of Democrats and Republicans, partisan identity of these two organizations could prove divisive and unproductive.

Afterwards, we discussed Raj Goyle’s candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives’ 4^th Congressional District in Kansas.  His mother, Vimal Goyle, and their friend, Prem Bajaj, shared with us information and background about Raj’s candidacy.  Unlike many other second-generation Asian Americans who left Wichita permanently to seek educational and job opportunities elsewhere in the country, Raj, a graduate of Harvard Law School, decided to return to Wichita to contribute to this community as a political activist and leaders.  Both of his parents are physicians who taught him since childhood the importance of taking care of the socioeconomically disadvantaged folks in the community. With this altruistic ethos, Raj Goyle worked for 6 years in a non-profit organization before he returned to Wichita to run for office as a Kansas state representative. He has served in the Kansas state legislature for the past four years. He is currently running for the U.S. Congressional seat in the November election. 

We also discussed the necessity of creating a general computer database based on membership directories of various Asian associations in Wichita.  If there is a need to gather all the Asians in Wichita for a general town hall meeting to discuss relevant sociopolitical issues, the directories in the general database can be tapped to mobilize members in various Asian associations in Wichita to participate and to strengthen coalition-building among various Asian groups. The logical choice for compiling the database is Wichita Asian Association.  But because the association lacks a large membership, it does not have enough human resources to create such a general database.

In addition to discussing the organizational challenges of strengthening the pan-Asian community in Wichita, we discussed the detrimental impact of the model minority myth. Because Asians are neither Black nor white, we are either rendered invisible in the community by the coverage of the mass media or considered as a model minority who do not need financial aid or scholarships.  As a consequence, scholarships awarded to Asian American students are often granted by ethnic associations in Wichita, such as the East Indian community. As a relatively marginal minority, there are no Asian American judges in Kansas.