Discussing issues ranging from activism on college campuses to stereotypes of Asian Americans, well-known writer and activist Helen Zia set the tone for this weekend's 25th annual East Coast Asian Student Union conference in a speech Saturday morning.
Working off ECASU 2002's theme of "Strangers in America," Zia touched on the case of accused spy Wen Ho Lee and the recent hate crimes on college campuses. She said Asian Americans are often invisible, even in television shows, such as ER and Chicago Hope, that feature "imaginary hospitals" with few Asian doctors. She later cited statistics showing that Asian Americans and Asian Pacific Americans make up 25 percent of the American health care workforce.
"Other Americans still see [Asians] as the invisible, silent, model minority, that has no voice and needs no voice in America," said Zia, a second-generation Asian American and an award-winning journalist. "What is believed about Asian Americans and Asian Pacific Americans is all too often, all too wrong," she told a large crowd in Page Auditorium.
Zia said Americans are quick to make the mistake of prejudging Asian Americans based on their race, something students echoed in the conference's workshops. Zia stressed to the young leaders, most of whom were trying to build Asian student associations at their own universities, that young Asian Americans needed "to assert how we see ourselves rather than how others see us."
She noted later, "Most core activists started out as student activists."
Over 800 students from more than 160 colleges gathered together for the conference, which featured more than 50 workshops on topics ranging from domestic violence, to theater, to the effects of Sept. 11 on hate crimes. The conference also featured an entertainment section and two other speakers.
The annual ECASU conference seeks to allow Asian students to network with each other and to share ideas about how to promote the advancement of the Asian-American population and ethnic awareness among its members.
Students came to the event to "learn what they could do to make a difference.... Asian students in the United States need to have a voice," said J.D. Hokoyama, president of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics and a leader of the workshop "Understanding Our Cultural Values."
The 2002 conference marks the second time that Duke's Asian Student Association has hosted the annual event, and only the second time it was held in the South. Last February, Duke's ASA and its counterpart organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill bid against the University of Pennsylvania's ASA to host ECASU 2002, and each school gave presentations at Columbia University to determine who would host it.
Sucheta Mazumdar, an associate professor of Chinese history at Duke, said this year's conference was especially important because the hosting of ECASU in a Southern state represents "a shift in the American landscape," with emerging Asian populations in the region.
Some students said they walked away very satisfied with the life lessons that they had learned from the speeches given during the conference and through the workshops that each student attended. Saturday morning, before ECASU events for that day began taking place, Duke freshman Roger Yamada said that he felt like he had gotten his "$40 worth through Friday night's activities alone."
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