This past weekend there was the first ever “National” Southeast Asian Intercollegiate Summit held at UC Berkeley. I put “national” in quotes because although the aim was to bring in students from across the nation, it was recognized that Southeast Asian collectives/coalitions is a very recent phenomenon found mainly in California. The existence of such a political identity comes from two important reasons: (1) the efforts to disaggregate the Asian Pacific American identity in order to better reflect the diverse heritages and circumstances of the entire Asian continent ( e.g. Pacific Islander, South Asian, Southeast Asian, East Asian); (2) that what constitutes a point of congruence for Southeast Asians is the Vietnam War (or Second Indochina War to put it more encompassingly) and the refugee and recent immigration experiences. We recognize the three main nationalities of Cambodian (Khmer), Laotian (Hmong), and Vietnamese, but I believe there are other ethnic groups to consider in the near future (such as displaced Teochew).
The attendants consisted of students mostly from Khmer Student Associations, LASR (Laotian American Student Representatives), and Vietnamese Student Associations, as well as guest speakers from various nonprofits. I came to the conference to represent UVSA Northern California, and to a lesser extent uNAVSA because of coinciding scope. By the way, Khmer is pronounced “kuh-MAI”. Upon registration, every attendant was given a portfolio rich with information (including contacts of all speakers and attendees, the names of the attendees and their assigned discussion group, biographies of organizers and speakers, panelist’s handouts, etc.)
The program stretched over two days. The four plenary sessions (2 on each day) had 4 panelists each, each one given 12 minutes to talk about their experiences as organizers and the kinds of issues their work attempts to resolve. Such work covered topics such as gender and sexuality, youth incarceration, occupational glass ceiling, model minority myth, sex trafficking, etc. The target audience of the conference were students who already had an understanding the issues, an important reason which I will explain later. Between plenary sessions were 15 minute regional caucuses (which only seemed effective for people who don’t know the other people in their region already), and the group discussions. The group discussions, I could tell were run on a variation of the Open Space Technology format. There were three rooms representing three broad themes: Economic Inequality; Social Injustice; and Political Underrepesentation.
The group discussion was broken into three parts, 1.5 hours each.
The first part was icebreakers for getting to know everyone in your room. The room was divided into four smaller groups and work began listing topics that related to the broad theme. As in the case of Economic Inequality, topics included lack of affordable housing; barriers to upward mobility (such as language, education, etc.); Southeast Asian underrepresentation in higher education; institutionalized economic racism; and human trafficking, just to name a few.
The second part of the group discussion focused on mapping out our personal experiences. How does your personal experience relate to the topics mentioned above? For example, in terms of human trafficking, I’ve been an advocate on the issue through my work in UVSA and uNAVSA; I’ve worked with Khoa Nguyen, a staffmember of San Jose City Major Chuck Reed, in holding a Vietnamese public forum on affordable healthcare; etc. Everytime a topic was mentioned as a personal experience, a tally mark was put next to the topic. This straw hat kind of “vote” helped determine the top four topics that students had the most experience to bring to the table. When asked whether their organizations have organized around issues, I brought up my impression on VSAs, “Most VSAs are really rallying points for cultural education. Advocacy work is not their bread and butter. For those that do do consistent advocacy work, they often form groups outside of the VSA, which is fine, because VSA acts as a space for discussion. Politics and advocacy can be organized in a separate group, which I see a lot of."
The third part of the group discussion identifies the top four topics under each theme, and the groups then go to work to brainstorm a solution. Prior to this third part, there was a workshop on “Creating Strategies”. A template for creating a strategy was provided in the portfolio, and so the speaker explained how to implement the chart. The chart helped organize our thoughts into an Action Plan. From this fruitful discussion, 12 action plans were created.
At the end of the day, the entire attendance reconvened and the 12 action plans were presented, including a recommendation for creating a Southeast Asian scholarship; developing a community resource directory; expanding the summit into a conference; organizing an access to higher education campaign; creating a network for queer (LGBT) Southeast Asian Americans; just to name a few. Every Action Plan was photocopied so that everyone had a copy of it. Students started taking initiative to get mailing list signups to maintain communication following the summit.
Because I was in the discussion room with the organizers on planning the next summit, we agreed that there had to be another summit, and we are looking to explore Southern California as the next location. My personal hope is that the next summit will give us a chance to reflect on any of the Action Plans that was created and how well the students took the idea and ran with it. A separate discussion group independently recommended that the summit encompass a “our progress” portion to the summit, which made me smile thinking “Man, great minds do think alike."
Friday night was dinner, held in a classroom, a cheap and casual affair, but a way to unwind after a long day of intense thinking and discussion. The dinner was followed by Open Mic, a chance for people to signup and make a presentation, whether it was singing a capella, break dancing solo, spoken word poetry (or simply poetry recital), or playing your guitar, etc. I suppose it’s one thing to see entertainers perform for a crowd, but I personally felt something different, because I knew the performers not just by their talent, but by their experiences as community organizers or instigators that we talked about earlier in the day.
On an ending note, I have to say this summit was refreshing, because they’ve employed a new format (I should say new for students) which allowed the students to construct the agenda and activities of the group (it’s not an organization… yet). Their portfolio contained a good amount of information that allowed for successful follow-ups. It wasn’t a perfect summit, as there’s always room for improvement, but for something that the organizers created really as an experiment to explore the ideas and resources “out there”, it has and will continue to take a life of its own.