AACP to Attend CHCP’s Ninth Chinese Summer Festival

AACP has some open dates in the months ahead. If you have some events that you think that we should attend, please feel free to suggest them. In the next feel months we hope to be at a convention or festival near you.

JACL Convention

The exhibitors included a variety of organizations from those that shared information on how we as individuals can contribute to the Asian American community to those with information on good places to visit this summer and learn just a little bit more about our history.

One way that you can help the Asian American community is by becoming a bone marrow donor. There are very few Asian Americans registered as donors with the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), which is why the Asian American Donor Program (AADP) was created why they were in attendance at the JACL convention. We can all do our part in helping to save lives by registering to become a donor. For more information, please visit www.aadp.org.

Or, if you would like to learn more about Japanese American history or experience the internment camps firsthand, some great places to visit would be the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Bainbridge Island, Manzanar, and Minidoka. For more information, please visit the respective websites:

• Japanese American National Museum
• Bainbridge Island (home of the first Japanese Americans to be relocated during WWII)
  • Bainbridge Island
  • Historical background on Bainbridge
• National Park Service's website for Manzanar
• National Park Service's website for Minidoka

The JACL convention also received local coverage from a Las Vegas TV station that has created a link page of special interest stories on Asia and Asian Americans. You can find their page at the KLASTV website.

Minidoka and Manzanar Exhibit at the JACL Convention

Other Up Coming Events

Date/Time	Event	Location
July 13-14	San Jose Obon Festival	San Jose Buddhist Temple San Jose, CA
July 14 10am-5pm	CHCP’s Ninth Chinese Summer Festival	History Park at Kelley Park San Jose, CA
July 20 10am-4pm	Books by the Bay	Yerba Buena Gardens San Francisco, CA
Aug. 4-9	Lake Tahoe Fellowship Conference	Zephyr Point, NV
Sept. 7 9am-4pm	Midori Kai Arts & Craft Show	MV Buddhist Temple Mountain View, CA

Editor's Message

Special thanks to Alisa Lynch of the National Park Service at Manzanar for making the trip to the JACL convention all worth it. Alisa Lynch made a sizable purchase of books to stock the library that they are creating at Manzanar (site of one of the Japanese American Internment Camps during WWII). The opportunity to meet people like Alisa Lynch - librarians and educators - is a major reason why we go to conferences, conventions, and festivals.

Coming soon - we will have an archive of our past newsletters on our website along with some of your feedback and responses. Watch for it.

Leonard Chan
Editor

Give Us Your Feedback

My brother and younger cousins always ask me why I am so active in the Asian American community, especially on the UC Berkeley campus. They ask me why I care so much about issues that to them seem non-existent. To them, racism and discrimination no longer exist. They were a thing of the past. It's the new millennium and people think differently now. Nobody thinks like that anymore.

Having participated in the Abercrombie & Fitch protest this past April, the younger ones in my family only saw that incident as something that Berkeley "had done to me." That Berkeley had turned me into a liberal and a radical.

However, the question we need to ask now is why are Asian Americans so apathetic? It is because society has made them focus on other things, other "more important" things. The parents are now focused primarily on putting their children through school and making sure that they receive a good education. After all, one cannot achieve success without an education. Although unaware of this, Asian American parents are helping their children perpetuate the stereotype of the Model Minority.

Most of the time, when we hear the word "racism", the first thing we think about is blatant racism. Therefore, it is no wonder that today's youth do not think that such a thing still exists. However, what they are not seeing is the not-so-blatant racism. The racism that lies in sweatshops, for they target immigrant or illegal women of color making them work long hours for little or no pay at all. We need to show today's youth that they should be proud of who they are. They should be proud of their heritage and culture. We need to make today's youth see that the computer can offer so much more than just games; there is a world of information out there just waiting to be discovered.