 Arar Han, BC ´03, gave the keynote address at the opening ceremony celebrating Asian heritage.
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Gasson Hall became a hub of activity Friday night as the opening ceremony for the Third Annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month sought to bring new meaning to the word "Asian-American" for the Boston College community.
The theme for this year's celebration was "expressing identity through art," a theme highlighted by the keynote speaker, Arar Han, co-editor of Asian American X and BC '03.
In her speech, Han addressed many of the issues facing young Asian-Americans in the contemporary United States. She began by describing an incident she believed to be common among most Asian Americans.
"[She is] sitting on the exit aisle of the plane between two white men. The steward comes over and asks the standard question of 'Will all of you be able to open the exit door if there were to be an emergency?' and right after this asks, 'Can everyone here understand English?' while directly looking at [Han]," she said.
Asians, according to Han, are still being typecast into quaint little catchphrases, slogans, and commercial pieces of art in modern U.S. catchphrases and slogans like 'All Asians are nerds' or 'A Chinese man works twice as fast for half the pay.' In addition, she said seemingly innocent questions and comments also show how white people view Asians today.
Questions like, "What are you?" and comments like, "You speak English really well" are simply an understated manner of putting Asians in an inferior class.
Everything isn't all subtle, said Han. Han offered a recent example of the tsunami song, played by New York radio station Hot 97, which parodied the natural disaster that killed millions of people.
In the song, words like "chink" are used to describe the people who died and God is depicted as a racist.
After Han's speech, people broke up into small groups to discuss certain excerpts from the book and how they felt about the issues surrounding it. One of the excerpts was an essay called, "A little too much Asian and not enough white."
The young man who wrote it is a Korean adoptee, raised by German American parents who felt that he needed to be heard out. He talked about how "[he was] white in every aspect of his life besides his facial features and skin tone" and how people would never truly see him as an American, rather, he would always be Asian.
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