Months after the Asian American Advisory Board abandoned its name and political focus, two Pan-Asian-American groups are trying new approaches to address the needs of their community.
AAAB changed its name to the Asian Pacific American Coalition in Spring Quarter, in hopes of focusing more on social issues such as identity, said James Huh, co-chairman of APAC, noting that the group had accomplished many of its political goals.
“We had a new role,” said Huh, a Medill senior. “We had to try to be a voice in matters other than Asian-American studies and do things at a more broad level.”
But the idea for a second Pan-Asian-American student group formed as Weinberg senior Howard Lien was flipping through the pages of a Freshman Facebook in the spring. He said he noticed there was something “worrisome” about the internal diversity of Northwestern’s Asian-American student population.
“Almost all of them are either Chinese, Japanese or Korean or South Asian,” Lien said. “There are very few Southeast Asians here.”
Southeast Asia includes the countries of Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, the Phillipines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
With the support of the Multicultural Center, Lien started a grassroots student organization called Asian American Students United.
Since its Spring Quarter inception, AASU has garnered about 175 members and now is lobbying for further universitywide recruitment of Southeast Asian students, as well as increasing Asian-American faculty diversity.
Pushing for more Vietnamese Americans and Filipino Americans will give NU a better representation of the diversity in the Asian-American communities, Lien said.
Lien said his group hopes to follow in the tradition of AAAB, which was born as a Pan-Asian political organization in 1995. Students in AAAB went on a 21-day hunger strike that year as a way to protest in support of an Asian-American studies program and a faculty advisor.
“We want to continue in the legacy of activism and advocacy,” Lien said. “They were willing to sacrifice food and their (grade point averages) for other students. But as important as activism and advocacy is, we also want education and outreach.”
Although Huh said the missions of the two groups overlap somewhat, his group’s 10-year history provides members with different opportunities and more traditional resources than the AASU, he said. The Associated Student Government recognizes APAC as A-status student group with senate seats and the chance to apply for student funding. The group also has a room in the Multicultural Center.
AASU, instead of focusing on strictly NU-related issues, networks with similar organizations at other universities and intends to use petitions as a main source of activism, Lien said. The group is drafting a report that cites the need for more Asian-American faculty in the humanities.
The two groups ran into some “discrepancies” earlier in the year, Huh said, as they tried to articulate the distinguishing characteristics between APAC and AASU.
“It probably came as a surprise to the freshmen to see two Asian-American student groups,” Huh said. “It came as a surprise to me, too. There’s been a lot of conflict trying to figure out what we are about and what AASU is about. There was never really any tension, but I guess there were conflicts of interest.”
The two groups have worked around their differences and will be collectively lobbying for efforts to increase diversity within the Asian-American student population.
As long as the two groups work together, both APAC and AASU will help serve a diverse group of students with diverse approaches, said Dimple Patel, coordinator for the Asian and Asian-American Student Services department.
“It’s great,” said Patel, who advises both groups. “We have a very large community, and my hope is that each group fulfills their mission.”
