Throughout the month of May, UMBC, Maryland and the Country celebrate the history, resilience, and cultures of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) communities worldwide as a part of APIDA Heritage Month. 

APIDA Heritage Month started as a week-long celebration in 1977 and later was expanded to a full month. The Month of May carries significance as it commemorates the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the transcontinental railroad completion on May 10, 1869 - honoring the majority Chinese Immigrants who laid the tracks. 

APIDA Heritage Month is a celebration of Asians, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. APIDA encompasses people from all of the Asian continent, India, and the Pacific islands of Melanesia (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands), Micronesia (Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia) and Polynesia (New Zealand, Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Easter Island). 

Today, there are approximately 20 million Asian Americans that trace their roots to more than 20 countries, each with their own unique histories, cultures, languages, and norms. While this diverse group is often treated as a monolith, significant differences exist by income, education, religion, etc. 

Throughout U.S. history and over the past year, we know our APIDA community has been impacted by Asian American hate crimes and anti-Asian sentiment. But even as we navigate these ongoing pains, we must also find/create and center spaces for joy, intentional rest, and shared community. Honoring APIDA Heritage Month is more than ordering Chinese or Indian food, it’s about amplifying lived experiences, uncovering challenging histories and recommitting to shared action and justice. Resources for you to learn more can be found below:

• Trans Arab Poetics | Friday, May 7 | 5-6pm

Support:

This is a repost on behalf of the Asian & Asian American Faculty & Staff Council. Original event post here.

 

Event Title: Uprooting and Seeding: Intergenerational Experiences of Living as Asians and Asian-Americans 

 

Join us for a discussion of Minari and Asian American representation!

Dear AAAFSC Members, Allies, and Students:

Please join us on May 3 from 4-5pm, for our final AAAFSC event of the semester; while we will be closing out the semester, we’ll also be celebrating the beginning of AAPI heritage month.

At this event, we’ll be discussing representations of Asian Americans in popular culture, with a particular focus on the recent, award-winning film, Minari. Minari is currently streaming on a variety of platforms. However, if you are unable to watch the film before the event, please consider joining us anyway. 

We are hoping to close out this semester by creating a space for an open, free-flowing discussion. We want this meeting to be a space that will allow us to reflect on our ethnic heritage and racial identity as a way to reclaim our strength and resilience and to resist systems of oppression and hate. We also hope to share with each other the complexities of Asian American lives and our day-to-day experiences.

While allies are warmly welcomed to this event, we ask that if you choose to attend, you are mindful of taking a step back and making space for our Asian and Asian American members to discuss and share their experiences first. 

We hope to see you there!

Many thanks,

The AAAFSC board: Tamara Bhalla (chair), Aditya Desai (member at large), Soonhee Lee (member at large), Shuyan Sun, (member at large),Christopher Tong (member at large), Fan Yang (secretary)

p.s. There is no required reading or even viewing for the event, but here are a few articles that might be helpful to situating our discussion:

 

‘Minari’ wins best foreign-language film, but not without controversy. The New York Times, Feb 28, 2021 by Maya Salam and Robert Ito

‘Minari’ is about immigrants who speak Korean. That doesn’t make it ‘foreign.’ Viet Thanh Nguyen, Dec 24, 2020

My “Minari”: On Asian American Immigrant Cinema, LA Review of Books, February 10, 2021 by Hanna Amaris Roh

 

 

ONLINE MEETING INFO:

Join us for a discussion of Minari and Asian American representation! Hosted by Tamara Bhalla https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m388f28dae1487b4b8ce67632b9cffbae Monday, May 3, 2021 4:00 pm | 1 hour | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) Meeting number: 120 311 5132 Password: MpK6jZMgq22 Join by video system Dial 1203115132@umbc.webex.com You can also dial 173.243.2.68 and enter your meeting number. Join by phone +1-202-860-2110 United States Toll (Washington D.C.) Access code: 120 311 5132

Along with so many others in our community, we breathed a sigh of relief for a moment this week as we heard that the police officer who murdered George Floyd had been convicted. However, even as the verdict was coming in, yet another Black American was being killed by a police officer, this time 16-year old Ma’Khia Bryant. We have so much work left to do. 

We join others in and beyond the UMBC community in working to find ways to end police violence and the systems of racism and white supremacy that enable it. We work towards this in our teaching and our scholarship. We also work towards this as members of our local, state, and national political systems, and encourage others to do the same. We are proud to be part of a state whose General Assembly passed sweeping police reforms into law earlier this month, making it one of the first law making bodies to do so (https://www.npr.org/2021/04/10/986159466/maryland-lawmakers-override-vetoes-on-sweeping-police-reform). And we call attention to reform at the national level, including legislation such as the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020” that was passed by the United States House and currently awaits Senate consideration (https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/7120). 

It is up to each of us to call our representatives’ attention to the actions we want them to take on our behalf. 

We know we are not alone in this, and that sustains us all. In the last few days, we have read the many thoughtful and moving statements from others in our community, and we urge others to do the same. There is much to do, and we are grateful to be doing it together.

In solidarity, 

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been reading See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love by Valerie Kaur. In the book, Kaur explores what brought her to a fight for social justice and the need for radical love, while offering insight into her lived experience as a Sikh American living in the United States. As she shares her story, she likens the darkness of the world to a “tomb” and a “womb.” In this likeness, she argues that if the world is in transition, and this darkness that we continue to experience is in fact the “darkness of the womb,” then the only way to move forward, is to “breathe and push.” We, as a community, are so connected to the pushing - pushing through, pushing up, pushing back… yet, we have not quite figured out how to first breathe. 

We know that so many in our community are overflowing with emotions and feelings connected to continuing isolation and hyper vigilance from COVID-19, accompanied by what feels like non-stop death, tragedy, racial injustice, and ongoing distrust of the criminal justice system. In the past, Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion & Belonging (i3b) and our associated centers - Pride, Interfaith, and Mosaic, have often rushed to hold processing and healing spaces, with and for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and our broader campus community. As a staff team composed 100% by folks of color, we are feeling intricately impacted, and at the current moment, we have found that we simply do not have the emotional capacity to hold such a space in an authentic, productive way. Yesterday, today and for the remainder of this week, instead of pushing through our own pain, we have decided instead to pause and breathe. As we take the time to process our own rage, exhaustion, and sadness, we still want to be sure that you know that we see you and are in this with you. If you, like us, are navigating a range of emotions, we encourage you to spend this week honoring your needs, and creating space for self-care and reflection, while connecting deeply with loved ones as you engage in community care. 

You may also want to connect with a confidential resource and/or clinician who is trained in dealing with issues of trauma. For such support, please connect with the Counseling Center. Find more information about connecting with a university counselor here: https://counseling.umbc.edu/

In closing, I offer this - “Revolutions do not happen only in grand moments in public view but also in small pockets of people coming together to inhabit a new way of being.” - Valerie Kaur

No matter who you are or where you are, we know that we are all navigating a lot and are all impacted by country-wide and international violence. We also know that ongoing racial violence and trauma uniquely impacts certain members of our UMBC community in ways that are pervasive, intergenerational, ongoing, and quite frankly, terrifying. Please create and protect the time you each need to care for yourself, and if you have the capacity, others. If you are feeling that you have the emotional ability and the privilege to detach from our current events, I invite you to invite others into community with you to explore new ways of being moving forward. 

In solidarity and with radical love,