Sharing and enjoying my Asian-American culture while at Yale

It's funny how, coming from a predominantly Asian high school and neighborhood to Yale, where the best Chinese food comes from the Main Garden take-out restaurant and the dining halls manage to make plain white rice unappetizing, I have immersed myself in the Asian-American community and, in the process, gained a greater understanding of what it is to be Asian-American.

The moment I set foot on the Yale campus I was bombarded by the smiling members of numerous different Asian student groups all vying for my time and energy for their respective clubs. Not wanting to turn any of them down, I signed up for just about all of them. The Asian American Students Association (AASA) is the umbrella organization for the eight main Asian-American ethnic groups, including the Taiwanese-American Society (TAS), the Vietnamese Students Association (ViSA), Korean-American Students at Yale (KASY), and the South Asian Society (SAS). There are also a number of smaller sub-organizations you can get involved in, like Unity, a Korean cultural drum troupe, the Yale Chinese American Journal (YCAJ), and the East Coast Asian Student Union (ECASU), a team of students planning for a pan-Asian conference to be held at Yale next February.

My roommate often jokes that my life at Yale has been taken over by acronyms--which is for the most part true. The different friends I have made through the various ethnic groups are all incredibly supportive. My freshman year has been intense. Every day is an adventure, filled with fond memories like steaming dumplings and boiling ramen noodles for friends studying for midterms, or practicing Judo in the gym. This year, I willingly sacrificed precious paper-writing time to attend cultural shows, organize study breaks at the Asian-American Cultural Center, plan conferences, listen to speakers for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in April, participate in kung fu skits and hip-hop dance groups, and watch my friends bare their souls and perform autobiographical writings about their experiences as Asian-Americans.

While Yale lacks the sheer numbers of Asian-Americans that universities like Berkeley or Stanford have, it makes up for that fact in the intimacy and comfort of a close-knit but active Asian student population. I'm thankful I have had the opportunity to become a leader within the Asian-American community. It's not perfect here, of course--Yale has yet to make a strong commit-ment to ethnic studies and tenuring more minority faculty, but at least I know I can play an active role in bringing about such changes.

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