An intimate group of around 20 students, faculty and community members led a candlelight vigil around College Green last night to shed light on hate crimes committed against Asians and Asian Americans on this campus and in this country.
Immediately following the vigil, part of Asian Pacific American Heritage Week and co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific Student Coalition, the group assembled in Houston Hall for a discussion that focused on many issues of concern for Asian Americans.
We want to "engage students" and get them to think "how we as the Penn community can address hate crimes," event coordinator and Wharton sophomore Nancy Zhang said.
Prior to the discussion and the vigil, President of the Japanese American Citizens' League of Philadelphia A.H. Nishikawa addressed to the group of mostly Asian and Asian-American students, leading them through a sordid history of American discrimination against Asians.
"How can the cycle of hate violence be broken?" Nishikawa asked rhetorically. He suggested Asian Americans adopt a strategy to redefine "Americanness."
During the group discussion, students grappled with the merits of giving up a part of their identity in order to replace it with another.
"Until we start projecting ourselves as American, nobody else will," discussion moderator and 2003 Penn Law School alumnus Anuj Gupta said.
However, not everyone was quite so willing to assume an American identity at the loss of their Asian heritage.
"Within the Asian-American community... there are those common strands that link Asian Americans and can link Americans, too," one student said.
There is "part of me that's Asian and it's different than American," another student added.
Gupta asked the group "what it means to be an American," and questioned to what extent Asian Americans fell into this definition.
It is important to change the notion that "'American' doesn't include 'Asian American,'" Gupta said prior to the discussion.
One student offered that "America is an idea" rather than a place, and it is therefore both possible and essential to convince those who are considered "American" that Asian Americans belong, too.
Nishikawa spoke of changes in Hollywood and on television as providing small steps toward the integration of Asian Americans into mainstream American culture, but noted that these steps have come slowly.
He cited the fact that the hit show ER only recently added an Asian doctor to its lineup, though it would be "impossible" to find a hospital in America without an Asian physician on staff.
Though many present agreed that the speech, vigil and discussion were constructive, they also said much still needed to be done on Penn's campus, noting they had hoped for a more diverse turnout.
It would be "nice for a cross-section" of the community to attend, "but in reality, it's 99 percent Asian American," Gupta noted.
Zhang agreed.
"Unfortunately, it's not the case" that those who attend such events are representative of the Penn community.
The night finished with a spoken word performance by College senior Carlos Gomez, who related the story of a black boy murdered in Mississippi to the shame every individual should feel when a hate crime is committed. Gomez wondered how Asian-American students can affirm being American when the nation has historically taken deliberate steps to exclude their culture.
But many in the crowd seemed optimistic about the future.
"The face of America is going to be multihued, certainly," Nishikawa said. "That's America. It's a good thing."
