Approximately 850 Asian-Pacific American students from over 120 East Coast colleges convened at Penn this weekend, and amid workshops, speeches, comedy shows and parties they kept one major concept in mind: power.
The students congregated at the University for the 28th Annual East Coast Asian American Student Union Conference, which is hosted by a different college every year, and is the largest gathering of Asian-Pacific American students in the United States.
Before introducing conference keynote speaker and MTV news correspondent SuChin Pak on Saturday night, Penn ECAASU co-Chairman and College senior Brian Redondo looked out at the audience and asked, "Do you all feel like you have power?"
He was alluding to an event that morning in which Christina Lagdameo, one of the board members of the National Asian Pacific American Woman's Forum, told students to stand up and say "I have power."
"Power is such a key theme," Redondo said. "Asian Americans often grow up feeling confused because they are not represented here and they are not represented there and that's when their voices often become silent."
The conference featured 70 individual workshops cent-ered around three themes -- awareness, tangible change and personal empowerment.
Redondo said that the three central themes were designed to help students become "aware of the issues that are important, come up with specific solutions and action plans and then embrace their own identity as Asian Americans and use that to become effective leaders."
According to Penn ECAASU co-Chairwoman and College and Wharton senior Karen Kim, one of the major issues discussed over the course of the weekend was identity and the experience of being a first-generation American with immigrant parents.
The Dec. 26 tsunami, as well as a New York City radio station song making light of the disaster's victims, were also hot topics.
One awareness workshop featured national bestselling author Helie Lee, who documented her family's war stories in Korea and chronicled her rescue of family members from North Korea.
In a workshop entitled "Biculturalism," Lee told students how, as a teenager growing up in the Los Angeles Valley, she tried desperately to shun her heritage and assimilate into Caucasian culture.
Once she entered the professional world, though, Lee said, "I had been running away from my family, my culture and my face, and I was tired from running. I said, 'I'm going to face my greatest fear in life -- to be Asian.'"
College sophomore Sean Kramar said he identified with Lee's talk because he is "hapa," or half-Asian.
In reference to Lee's exhortation to students to ask the older generations about their personal history, Kramar said, "My grandpa has always been this old Korean guy I respect, but now I want to ask him about the Korean war."
While raising awareness, the conference was also intended to give students ideas about how to effect change in their respective universities.
Lagdameo told students about how, as a student at the University of Maryland, she ordered fortune cookies for a dinner with the administration that held the message "Asian American Studies now" to get such an academic program on the road to being implemented.
Kim said that this year's conference differed from past conferences mainly in its emphasis on networking among students and between students and activists.
To further this goal, Kim and her fellow organizers randomly assigned students to small student-led peer groups that met twice to discuss pertinent issues and to reflect upon the other events.
"Many students when they came to Penn didn't know each other," Kim said. "It was cool to see them leaving with friendships."
The weekend's events culminated with Pak's address on Saturday night.
Kim said that the question-and-answer session following the address -- during which students brought up issues such as tokenism, the "model minority" myth and biculturalism -- reflected the success of the conference.
"They were drawing [on] the things they had been thinking about during the day. We were making them think," she said.
