WAA welcomes and celebrates this year's
Asian Awareness Month and encourages everyone to join us as we attend the following AA Month events! If you have any question, please contact our own AAS Representative
Mina Yu '09 or
Steph Tung '09, the two coordinators of the AA Month Committee. See you soon! ;)
February 27Blue Scholars: A Concert Tishman Commons
Doors Open at 6:30 p.m.Blue Scholars are a hip-hop duo based in Seattle, Washington. The duo was created in 2002 while the members, Geologic and Sabzi, were part of The SHOW (Student Hip-Hop Organization of Washington) at the University of Washington, Seattle. The group consists of one DJ Saba/Sabzi (Saba Mohajerjasbi) and one MC Geo/Geologic (George Quibuyen).
They will be opened by
Sejal Babaria '09,
Karin Firoza '10, and
Beats Collective.
March 10
Sentenced Home with Dimple RanaLibrary Lecture Room
7 p.m.Sentenced Home follows three young Cambodian Americans through the deportation process. Raised in inner city Seattle, they pay an unbearable price for mistakes they made as teenagers. Caught between their tragic pasts and an uncertain future, each young man confronts a legal system that offers no second chances. As part of a large group of Cambodian refugees admitted to the U.S. in the early 1980s, the deportees and their families found asylum in Seattle’s grim public housing projects and hoped for a piece of the American dream. But, as “permanent residents,” the refugees were not afforded the same protections as American citizens. Under strict anti-terrorism legislation enacted in 1996, even minor convictions can result in automatic deportation. For some, this means being permanently separated from families and homes because of a minor offense—such as the case of Loeun Lun, who fired a gun in the air as a teenager to protect himself from a gang attack. Along with family man Loeun Lun, who fights to stay together with his wife and children from behind bars and across oceans, audiences will meet former gang member Kim Ho Ma, who struggles to come to terms with his identity in a country he doesn’t understand. Also introduced is an introspective Many Uch, who looks to redeem himself by taking advantage of what time he has left in the U.S. to give today’s Cambodian American youth something he never had—the ability to play little-league baseball.
Sentenced Home follows Lun and Kim Ho Ma all the way to Cambodia. There Lun begins building a tiny shack for himself amidst rice paddies, while Kim Ho tries to contain his anger and frustration at U.S. immigration law, and the lack of opportunity in the city of Phnom Penh. Meanwhile, as Many Uch leads his baseball team, inspiring members of the Seattle community to re-think their negative opinions of the deportees, his own deportation status hangs in the balance of an unblinking legal system increasingly deemed unfair.
Dimple Rana is a Gujarati Indian American woman who has grown up with the Cambodian American refugee community in Revere, Massachusetts. Over the past 11 years Dimple has been actively involved in community organizing, social justice education, gang peacemaking, and social, educational, and economic support within the Cambodian American community. Since 2002, when the U.S. and Cambodia signed a repatriation agreement regarding the repatriation of over 1,500 Cambodian American refugees convicted of “aggravated felonies,” she has been fighting deportations of Cambodian Americans.
March 18
Following the Fortune Cookie with Jennifer 8. Lee
Tishman Commons
5 p.m.Jennifer 8. Lee is a metropolitan reporter at
The New York Times, where she has worked for many years. She harbors a deep obsession for Chinese food, the product of which is
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which explores how Chinese food is all-American. At the
Times, she has written about poverty, the environment, crime, politics, and technology.
She was born and raised in New York City, attending Hunter College Elementary School and Hunter College High School for a total of 14 years. She majored in applied math and economics at Harvard, where she also angsted a lot about
The Harvard Crimson, a fabulous start-up magazine called
Diversity & Distinction, and the Asian American Association. After college, she fled to China and spent a year at Beijing University studying international relations.
Her parents are from the tiny island off the coast of China variously called Quemoy, Kinmen, or Jinmen. She has a younger sister named Frances (foreign exchange programmer) and a younger brother named Kenneth (actuary). If you string their first initials together, it spells J.F.K., which their parents tease is the airport they landed at when they first came to the United States (though currently, J.F.K. is her least favorite of the N.Y.C. airports).
She is a former member of the Poynter Institute National Advisory Board, a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and has been featured in the Esquire Women We Love issue.
April 2No Life without Wife with Shilpa Davé Library Lecture Room
5:30 p.m.Brandeis Asian American Studies Professor
Shilpa Davé has been working on gender dynamics and presentation in the South Asian American community related to the idea of arranged marriage, and will be discussing her research in this lecture. The lecture covers the film
Bride and Prejudice, as well as the character Apu from
The Simpsons, and then delves into masculine and feminine performances at an arranged marriage conference she recently attended. Wellesley Sociology Professor
Smitha Radhakrishnan will close the lecture with a brief presentation on her own research on the online dating world of Indian Americans.
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