Asian Pacific American Heritage

 Our special month of celebrating our culture and sharing it with all of America is now over.  I hope that it was a meaningful month for you.  The event does seem to gain more sophistication each year as our community learns the ways in which we are able to celebrate and share our heritage so that these acts genuinely represent who we are.  Furthermore, they cause those of us who are APAs to be proud and give those of us who are not APAs a sense of the richness and diversity that we offer to America.

The month of May was full of events and activities that fulfilled the spirit and intent of the observance.  I attended several events and enjoyed each one of them.  I was especially proud of the two events in which our chapter took active parts in.  The first was being a part of the Asian American Business Conference.  Our Board Member Rachel Chen was on the organizing team for the conference that occurred at the University of Maryland.  Larry Shinagawa was one of the primary hosts for the university.  Our booth was staffed by Stan Tsai, Jeffrey Wu, Wilbur Friedman, Cindy Chatman, and me.  The second event was the Fiesta Asia Festival that was organized by the Asia Heritage Foundation and was a full day event on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks away from our Capital.  We had over a dozen volunteers staffing our booth, including Jeffrey, Wilbur, Larry, Stan Tsai, Annette Cheng, Kim Li, Emily Peng, Katie Xiao, Lynne Chiao, George Wu, Doug Lee, Mary Tom, Jing Pei, Julie Chen, and me.  Both events gave us the chance to demonstrate that OCA-DC is an integral part of our community and that we care about participating in its activities.  We were able to distribute materials and information about OCA and our local involvement in the community.  We give special thanks to Echo Zhang for producing a first rate flyer that described our chapter's recent activities.  We met with hundreds of visitors to our booth at both events and had a great time communicating with them.  We hope that many of them will decide to join OCA.  In fact, from the two events, we signed up 14 new members.  We were also able to network with other Asian American organizations and businesses, forming foundations for possible future collaborative ventures.  I came to the genuine realization that we are a huge community that can and should connect with one another for a lot of common good.  I plan to elaborate on some of these opportunities in future articles and at our board meetings.  These will include DC Chinatown, Smithsonian Asian American Program, Chinese American Citizens Association, and Chinatown Community Cultural Center.

There were several other events that many of us attended individually during the month, including performances of Asian music and dance at various venues and the Asian American Health Conference.  Indeed, the month was rich with observances of our heritage.  We should be appreciative of the many organizations that took the time and energy to organize all the events.  Most of all, we should always be proud of our heritage!

Stan Lou

May 28, 2009