Achievers
Books
Business
Calender
Community
Controversy
Cuisine
Eateries
Education
Enterprise
Faith
Good Samaritans
Health
Infotech
Media
Memories
Movies
News Archives
Opinion
Specials
The Arts

Capturing the essence of a continent

Chithra Karuna Karan

Fozia Ilyas of Pakistan wears her red satin gharara. Her friend Inderjit, who is also a Punjabi like Fowzia but from the Indian side of the border, changes into her salwar kameez minutes after stepping off the A train and rushing into the tiny bathroom of a Laundromat across the street, to get ready. Annie Charles, originally from Trinidad wears a lehnga which, she told the audience, "I wear only to mandir!" The three are joined by Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean faculty and students on the makeshift runway, starring in what I had initially billed a "Pan Asian Traditional Costume Wrap", but which has since expanded to include imaginative variations of saris, sarongs, cheongsans and kimonos.

We are gathered at the Hee Seung Fung dimsum restaurant in Chinatown's Bowery. While we gorge on prawn with walnuts, Buddhist delight, salt-baked filet of sole and sweet red bean soup among other delicacies, Tom Lew, our IT man emcees his share of the program, I go on (live!) with my South Asian and Indo-Caribbean students. What are we really doing? We are each participating in that game of racial and ethnic identity politics that is essential for membership in American society. We collect in groups, read our poetry, play our music, tell our stories, network for jobs, strategize to lose stereotypes like "the model minority". Fowzia and Inderjit are recent immigrants, having arrived less than three years ago. But they have already learned that in order to be American, they must re-invent being Asian.

This is the Asian heritage month. This is when digitized images of Tiger Woods, Deepak Chopra, Yo Yo Ma and Michelle Kwan appear (together!) in cybermontage. Black History Month has been followed by Women's Herstory Month, St Patrick's Day parade has once again marched up Fifth Avenue without too many beer bottles being thrown, and the Ancient Order of Hibernians is still preventing gays and lesbians from marching in St Pat's parade under their own banner. I've put away my "Kiss me I'm Irish" button and now it's time for APIs like myself to strut our stuff.

Our college is stealing a march on most other academic and educational institutions by celebrating a little early, in April rather than May, in those two weeks before spring break and after midterms. If you google, the search engine with scholarly leanings will deliver 14000 plus sites proclaiming their interest in Asian and Pacific Islander culture. In addition, the US Bureau of the Census is a veritable mother lode of stats of every sort on every racial and ethnic group in the country. In its "We the Americans" series, Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders each merit their own reports. Now the Racial Statistics Branch of the US Bureau of the Census calls us American Asians.

This is when Census 2000 is in full swing and we APIs are busy counting ourselves into the pool of Americans so that we can get schools, parks, housing and other services in our neighborhoods and communities. We check the appropriate boxes or fill in additional details --Chinese, Asian Indians, Hmong, Laotians, Cambodians, Filipinos, Thai, Vietnamese and "Other Asian".

We number 6.9 million, a 99 per cent increase from the 1980 census. More than two-thirds of us live in just five states -- CA, TX, HA, NY and IL. We are a young population -- we have a median age of 30 compared with a national median age of 33. Our families are larger (3.8) than the average American family (3.2), largely because more of us raise children in two parent families (81 per cent vs 70 per cent).

Given our diverse points of origin, 56 per cent of us do not speak English. Asian Indians had the highest educational attainment while the Hmong had the lowest. Asian Indian men had the highest workforce participation rates -- 84 per cent contrasted with 74 per cent of all working men.

More of our family members (Filipino, Asian Indian, Thai) are in the work force than American families as a whole. We have higher paying jobs largely because of higher educational attainment, but we also suffer higher rates of poverty (14 per cent) than the national average (13 per cent).

But these faceless stats have to translate into memorable symbolic acts. So Fowzia puts on her red gharara and sits next to the college president, who is Hispanic. Race rules. Ethnicity speaks. Punjab is on the map. We walk the talk. Same time, next year.

Previous: Naseer, Jaya prove serious theater can be fun

Tell us what you think of this report