Asian American Heritage Month is almost half over. It’s our opportunity to educate those not in our communities about our histories and personal experiences. We have the opportunity to share and bond over personal experiences. We can do it any other time of the year, too – I regularly enjoy posting APIA-related news on Facebook/Twitter – but May is an especially opportune time because it’s the time when all of our APIA communities can come together.
So when I was flipping through the tv guide on Xfinity and saw the green banner declaring “Asian American Heritage Month special,” I was intrigued. What did they have on there? I knew Who made the films and music and cartoons in that special? Where did they come from? I saw the banner a bunch of times, and didn’t click on it with the remote because I thought, like everything on Xfinity, you had to pay for it. So I ignored it, and continued flipping through the guide hoping to find something good to watch in my small breaks from studying.
Then Friday night, I was hanging out with one of my friends who saw the banner, and he clicked on it. And lo-and-behold, there was actual APIA substance on there – “Lt. Watada,” the documentary on Ehren Watada (I’ve met his dad, and he’s so cool), and “Aoki,” a documentary on Richard Aoki, a civil rights activist. There biographies on prominent APIA in our mainstream media, too.
That was pretty cool, I thought, Xfinity is doing something right. They’re looking for the stories about Asian Americans, those who identify as such, those who were born in the US. Those who are continually put in the category of “forever foreigner” because some people might not be able to understand that we aren’t all immigrants, that some of us were actually born in the US – these were some of our stories.
Then my friend found gold: music videos from Korea and Japan. We went through Super Junior, G-Dragon, BigBang, and T-ARA.
