The brand new site for the 2011 summit in Twin Cities is here! Click here to check out the latest on this summer’s summit!

waddup summit fam and frenz!

big shhhhhhh…. is bout to pop in the bay as we gear up for our contributions to FUNDRAISING, PROMOTION, and SUPPORT for twin cities ’11!!!

the wheels are in motion, so keep your eyes and ears open cus you don’t wanna get left behind.

UPDATES will be posted as they develop.

don’t sleep.

Wuddup APIA Summit Tribe!

Leng and I recently did a piece for the victims of the Khmer rouge Repping Tiny Toones and Jumakae was generous enough to record the performance for us. We hope you enjoy it.

Can’t BTW can’t wait for the next time we meet. Twin cities 2011 is not so far away.

What’s GOOD APIA Summit Fam?

It’s been awhile since I’ve checked this website out, and I would have to saaayy….. I need to utilize it more

Mini intro: I’m Tracy. UC Berkeley. Incoming SENIOR yeee! Interning @ API Equality. AND GUESS WHAT?! I’m gonna be in Minnesota for… get ready…

THE FIRST EVERY QUEER SOUTHEAST ASIAN CONFERENCE. SO STOKED!!!!!

Twin cities, be ready for us =D.

I also wanted to hollaaaa at all my Queer and APIA folks for a project I’m working on at API Equality.
Project Q is a new and developing community arts project that seeks to foster the creative and political development of Asian Pacific Islander Queer leaders and to share the queer API experience through creative story-telling, visual art, performance, dancing, and much more! For more information, follow projectq.tumblr.com!

Please check it out if you are around the Bay Area. We’re going to have an exhibition in September, but if you just wanna participate through the summer, you’re more than free to just drop in!!

That’s all I have for y’alls.  Until next time…

tracy | tracynguyenn@gmail.com

some APIA shoutouts:

Holla @jessehuynh my SEA brother who came through to SASC SI all the way from Mississippi! I’m going to be visiting your city now!

& Holla @jenniile who’s in AATC’s Beijing, California.

Check it outtt. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCzrKuqiKIA

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/us/politics/14haley.html?th&emc=th

You learned the wrong lesson, Nikki.
Your brothers were chased by other boys
inflated by white privilege and testosterone,
they ripped the turbans off of Mitti and Charan’s heads
and yanked their long hair until tears filled their eyes
like overripe mangoes ready to burst.
They cut their hair that day,
their pride falling
to the linoleum floor
in dense, black clumps.

That was the day you decided to change your name.
You realized there was no room for a place
in South Carolina for a girl named Nimrata Randhawa.
And when Republican State Senator Knotts
called you and Obama a “fucking raghead”
you decided to prove him wrong
by standing for a platform
even whiter and richer than his.
This is the party you’ve joined,
the same one that push polled in the primary
calling you a Muslim, as if such a thing were a crime,
questioned your patriotism,
and accused you of cheating on your husband.

Even as you claim to be pro-life,
you cut holes in the social safety net,
lower wages, smash unions, and ensure
that those babies will join a cycle of poverty
that your parents left India to escape.
You are making this a country worth leaving.

Can you taste the irony, Nikki?
You sponsored state legislation that mirrored Arizona’s SB1070.
And I wonder how long it will be
until the state trooper stops you
for being too foreign, too brown, too dark
and demands your papers,
jackboots blacked, badge shined,
enforcing the laws of xenophobes
that cuss you on the street
on the internet, and behind closed doors.
Aidia, Maria, and Sofia
working 16 hours a day
cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors
are not as different from you
as you’d like to believe.

Your reflection never looked pretty to you,
but you never asked why.
You just filed for a name change
and registered as a Republican.
Maybe this was the only America
that you were shown.

It doesn’t matter if you wear the varsity jacket, Nikki,
you’re still not going to get invited
to the good parties.
You can paint your face white
but they still won’t throw you the ball.

And if the cost of acceptance
is to become that which hates you,
Asian, Indian, woman, brown then
Nikki, the truth is
that you don’t need to be kidnapped
to develop Stockholm Syndrome.

A couple weeks ago I showed you Anida Yoeu Ali’s 1700% Project video, which was accompanied by a performance and art installation. Well, last week it was defaced with a shitload of anti-Muslim caricatures…ARE WE IN 1804??? Anyway, I have responded via Change.org:

Sometimes while living in this post-racial utopian harmony — in which Chris Matthews can forget that Obama is black for an hour — I tend to assume racism resides just in America’s less cosmopolitan regions…you know, the towns where the History Channel shoots reality shows about snake-handlers.

Read More | Follow me on Change.org

Hey APIA Family!!!

Just wanted to share with you my latest sun:SCRIBES Scroll (Newsletter).  So I just clipped some bits of it below

You can read the full thing at: http://fburls.com/5-9V4eU3Wa or www.therealsun.com

The Eighth Scroll:

“ASIAN HERITAGE”?

May 3rd, 2010

Ah, yes, SOUL-SHARINGS…. always my favourite part.  I have decided to dedicate this issue of sun:SCRIBES speaking to “Asian Heritage”.  This is partly because the discussions that were sparked at  Toronto Poets’ Saturday Night Love: “Are Asians The Ignored Majority”, were immensely passionate.  And also because this is a topic that I personally am very interested to see grow in the presense of  discussion.

“Asian Heritage Month” is May.  I did not know that there was even an Asian Heritage Month until a few years ago.  I never learned about it in school or heard about it in the communities I was a part of.   And I have to question why is that?… I’ll touch on this a little later on.

Asian Heritage Month was incepted in Toronto in 1993.  1992 in the states, they call it Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.   According to CBC and the government of Canada Website it is “Asian Heritage Month”,  According to Wikipedia, its “South Asian Heritage Month”.  I will choose to stick with “Asian Heritage Month”  instead of “South Asian Heritage Month” because, well, with the latter, I don’t get an  official month to celebrate my heritage as an East Asian………….! 

Yes… Asian Heritage.  What does this mean?  Especially in the context of our North American Diasporic Experience?  I’m still trying to wrap my head around it…  It must mean I inHERITED something, because I’m Asian, right?  But, how do I celebrate my heritage without feeling tokenized, exotified, or mis-represented?   Maybe I’m over thinking it……

I’m just not sure what to celebrate…

Does that sound absurd?

How can I explain…. I think back to the history of East Asians on this land, and this is the only and specific context I speak from (not the stuff that happened back home IN asia, but here in Canada).  And the first thing I think of is the Candian Pacific Railway… probably the only thing I ever heard in school that mentioned Asians as a part of Canadian History.

The Chinese built the railway.  Cool.  Under exploitive and oppresive conditions… building something that wasn’t their own, or meant for them to benefit from, with just enough at the end of the day to be living in poverty, in highly racist conditions.  (They don’t teach that last part in school, at least not in my school they didn’t).

Then came The Head Tax… The Government restricting the entrance and immigration of Asians of East and South, into Canada…. I guess they didn’t have use for us anymore?

Next…. The Japanese Internment Camps during World War II… persecution, red baiting, all asians are labelled communists, Japanese and anyone suspected to be, or close enough, were inprisoned, against human rights… OK.

Fast Forward to more recent times… Asian contributions recognized in today’s society…  Apparently we’re all good at math, have a monopoly over convenient stores and have parents that speak in funny accents…. oh and we are super-good at assimilation.  Awesome.

I must sound bitter and synical to you.  I  say this because I sound bitter and synical to myself.  lol.

Like I said, I’m not sure how to celebrate this Month.  And maybe i’m just ignorant, no I AM ignorant, I don’t know enough of my own history to know what I should celebrate…

All I can think of to celebrate is the complexity of our relationship to our own identities.  And I’m not sure celebrate is the right word for it.  I think maybe the words “investigate” , “explore”, or “shed light on” may be better terms to describe it.  Bringing attention to the complex ways that these histories, and the fact that we are disconnected and not knowing of these histories, have impacted our sense of identity as Asian-Canadians, or atleast the Asian-Canadians I know.

I think at this point I’ll just continue on speaking only for Myself and my own relationship to these complexities….  I am not a spokesperson for my entire race in this country.  Only for MYSELF.

Back to the not-knowing-ness of my relationship with “Canadian Asian Heritage”….

There is an Korean-American Poet by the name of Ishle Yi Park, and in one of her poems speaking to the Korean-American experience she said “Where are our Martins? our Malcoms?… All we have are Fathers with thick Tongues”.

…I don’t know how to answer her.

Where ARE our Malcoms? Where ARE our Martins, and Rosas?  They MUST have existed…?  And if so, why don’t I know who they were?  Why has no one celebrated them?   They Must have existed….. ……right?

Where is the other side of my history?  The Indentured Labour, The Head-Tax, The Internment Camps, Scapegoating…. someone must have stood up for us….  Someone must have said and done something?!  ….I don’t know.  That part of my history is missing in my life.  And I have to come back to the questions of Why?  Why is that?

Am I supposed to be satistifed with celebrating with dragon dances, how far we have come in this economy,   how well my community has assimilated into this system based on greed and exploitation?  The Corporatons?  The Doctors? the Lawyers?  The Accountants?

I don’t buy it.

I’m NOT satistified with that.  And I REFUSE to be satistifed with that.

THIS IS A CALL TO ARMS…

a CALL TO KNOWLEDGE,

a CALL TO THE NARRATIVE OF OUR ANCESTORS.

I need your stories,  I need to know my history and herstories.

if YOU, yes YOU or anyone you know have these stories,  i IMPLORE of you to share them.  And I would love for you to share them with me,  but if you don’t want to share them with me, share them with someone else.  But share them. Please.

I’m going to take it upon myself this month to really research the history of Asian Canadians in Canada.  And try to uncover what “Asian Heritage” really means to me.  I hope you will join me on this journey, let me know if you are up for it!  I love being nerdy with other people.  lol  please email me at sun@therealsun.com

Let’s celebrate our ancestors and collect their narratives so that we can better understand where we come from so that we can have a clearer vision of where we are to go.

And let’s continue to celebrate OURSELVES, proudly, not exclusively or over-patriotically in a divisive way, but proudly, passionately.

Shout outs to my Brothers and Sisters that are part of the KEEP/DEEP and  the Asian Pacific Islander Spoken Word Poetry Summit Family… I miss you!!!  I will see you in Minneapolis Summer 2011.  (Any APIA or Asian Canadians interested in this network check out www.apiaword.com)

Yellow Ranger Out.

(This is the story of a fictional character, based on true events that took place in Korea, that I learned about during my travels there, as well as reference to true stories from the Canadian-immigrant experience. Written for a NoManzLand Play)

“NA-YOUNG’s STORY”

Factories, filled with fibres that coat my lungs, like tiny hands built to choke my life out from within me.

When I walk into that windowless building, the sun is always still tucked away beneath the horizon, waiting to wake with the dawn, and shine light to the earth…

When I walk out barely able to fight my exhaustion, the sun is already fast asleep.  I feel as though I haven’t seen the sun for years… my skin pale as the crescent moon that accompanies me on my walk home.

I worked all day and all night, crouched over my sewing machine.  As the managers marched the isles, like guards in prison, march the cells.

We were not allowed to take breaks or go to the bathroom when we needed to.  Many of us got sick, but we still had to work.

We needed the money.

We worked hard, SO hard.  But it was never enough.

But we, we had had, enough.

So we began to whisper when we were far away from the factories.  We would whisper our plans, our dreams.  Our hearts would beat with excitement and fear.

We the women in the factory stood up for our rights.  We joined hands and formed a resistance.  We took over the factory and organized a sit in.  Some of us started a hunger strike…

They hosed us with cold water, they even threw shit at us… literally, fecal matter.

It was so degrading, humiliating, de-humanizing.

All because we wanted to be treated with dignity.  Because we wanted a fair wage.  Because our families were struggling.  And they refused to listen.

I was a leader amongst them.  I was scared but I couldn’t sit and die this slow death.  So I resisted with all I had inside of me.  I refused to sit and suffer.

When the police finally raided us and took us by force, they protected me.  My co-workers, my sisters, my comrades.  And I escaped.

The police had warranted my arrest, and so I was now a fugitive on the run.

That is how I ended up here.

Living in constant fear of deportation, for I would only go back to face imprisonment.

But for now I am here.

—

© 2010 sun a.k.a. The Real Sun

strength x love x balance

**life is like a walk along the beach, no matter how you step, you will leave a footprint behind; the only thing you have control over is the directions your footprints lead, and the understanding of where they come from** ~ sun a.k.a The Real Sun

www.therealsun.com

From iLL-Literacy.com:

When I was a sophomore in college, I got pulled over for going 90 mph while knocking Anida Yoeu Ali‘s “Excuse Me, ameriKa.” and while I admit that it was extremely geeky to be an outlaw due to poetry (I once also got written up in my dorm for bumping Sage Francis too loud…ughhhhh…) it’s hard to escape the excitement I felt as a young underspoken Asian kid hearing one of his own spit fire for the first time. Since then Anida’s played a huge role in my life, even taking me under her wing in the fateful Chicago summer when I decided to follow in her footsteps and pursue a career as an artist. Some years later, she teams up with Masahiru Sugano to present Mistaken For Muslim, yet another landmark piece. This time she calls attention to post-9/11 anti-Muslim violence – an issue that tragically remains relevant a decade after the fact. As a part of the 1700% Project which entails the poem, video, and an accompanying installation performance, “Mistaken For Muslim” is truly the most gripping piece of visual spoken word I’ve seen in a long time. Check it out above, and if you digit, vote for it for the One Chicago One Nation Film Contest!

My friends The Like Me’s and Marco Bercasio bring us a music video that bridges the gap between the generations. By taking an old Cambodian psychedelic rock song and giving it a modern twist my sista Laura Mam just might be able to breath life back into an almost forgotten genre of ethnic rock. Well, besides my other fave Cambodian rock band Dengue Fever! San Jose! Cambodia! Stand up!

Magnetic North

PROJECT MISSION: SULU DC’S JULY 17, 2010 CONCERT
___

The Smithsonian Institution approximated that more than 350,000 Asian Pacific Americans live in the metropolitan area surrounding Washington, DC. In the U.S., there are roughly 30 Asian American and 24 Pacific Island American groups–perhaps with the 2010 Census, even more will be revealed! In short, AAPI folks have unique voices and experiences, and are in need of the support of audiences and backers like you to continue to be able to have a platform to use to share these stories.

July 2010 will mark the eighth show that Sulu DC has hosted. The Washington Post branded Sulu DC “the face of DC poetry” in a recent article. So, we’re making our July show worthy of the praise. We’ve confirmed the following artists for the July 17, 2010 show:

SNRG
www.snrg.biz

Stone Forest Ensemble
http://www.sfenyc.com/

Magnetic North + Taiyo Na
http://www.magnetichiphop.com/

But, bands are expensive. We at Sulu DC want to continue to push the envelope and present quality arts to our national, inter-generational, multi-ethnic audiences. In order to sustain this, we need to gage interest and financial support through your pre-sale tickets to cover our costs (artist fees, sound, tech, venue, etc.) so that we’ll be ready to launch the July show.

EVEN IF YOU CAN’T ATTEND THE SHOW, PLEASE CONSIDER BACKING US! DONATIONS AS SMALL AS $5 CAN BE ACCEPTED. TO DATE, WE’VE RAISED $146 OF OUR $2,500 GOAL. WILL YOU KICK START US? CLICK HERE TO READ MORE, DONATE OR JUST LEARN MORE!

Small footnote: 2013 Summit is in DC, ya’ll! Sulu DC is hella, super extra ready to host the Summit fam!

love & light,

sim1, jenny, regie, brian and alex