Yale Asian community should unite

By Connie Liu

Jackson's explanation satsfied me in that I honestly believe Yale is not deliberately discouraging Asians from applying and matriculating. The lowered statistics, however, do indicate a pattern that should concern members of the Asian American community, a community which has a responsibility to show unity, to mobilize, and to study the reasons for the decline in Asian matriculation. There is a distinct need to foster an atmosphere in which new students are not only heavily recruited but also feel comfortable participating in Asian-American community events.

I looked around the room as I listened to Jackson, and I recognized several members of the Chinese-American Students Association, the South Asian Society, and various other subgroups of the Asian-American Students Association, and wondered how unified the Asian-American population at Yale actually is.

The fact that members of its community would attend a meeting such as the one which took place on Mon., Mar. 30 is testament to a certain degree of unity. But these single instances of Asian-American unity belie the fact that on a daily basis, Asian-Americans at Yale are, as a community, less politically oriented than other minority groups, and are not consistently politically active.

Most Asian-Americans wear several labels at once. Each subgroup (such as Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and so on) faces its own set of cultural and social issues. It becomes confusing for me to determine how I, as a member of both the Taiwanese-American community and the larger Asian-American community, should balance the two roles. There are issues particular to me as a Taiwanese-American that are not as relevant to my Indian-American friend; likewise, we face two different, although not mutually exclusive, sets of stereotypes.

At the same time, as American-born Asians, my friend and I share a common concern for the diminishing number of Asian-American students at Yale, and so we went together to the cultural house and listened to Jackson's explanation. But this is only the beginning of the solution.

To start solving this problem and others like it, the Asian-American community needs to find a consistent focus, and perhaps needs to become more regularly aware of itself. This problem cannot be solved in the short-term. Rather, it demands that the Asian community develops a long-term strategy designed to work with the Admissions Office to attract prospective Asian-American students to Yale.

It is easy to mobilize when an issue that affects all Asian ethnic groups comes to the forefront. Unfortunately, when such a pressing concern is not bringing us all together, it can be difficult to find a way to participate in any sort of politically unified action within the largely and lamentably fragmented Asian-American community at this University. The subgroup cultural identities are not easy to ignore, nor should they be overlooked. They play the larger role in the individual's understanding of ethnic identity. But when issues do arise that affect more than one Asian subgroup, it is necessary to come together under the rather nondescriptive term of Asian-American to have a recognizable political impact.

What the individual Asian-American needs to do is recognize that being politically conscious involves more than reacting to an issue such as a drop in matriculation rate. Instead, Asian-Americans should become more aware that although relating to the larger Asian-American community as a whole is at times difficult given the cultural differences between different subethnic groups, unity among these various groups is the most effective way to keep the community politically active and viable.