The Asian NU Project was born seven months before the egging of two Asian students pushed the group directly into the light of Northwestern’s diversity efforts. But even after the event, the group’s mission remains the same: unity within the community.
In the midst of a whirlwind of racially insensitive incidents, diversity discussions and harsh published commentaries, organizers of the Asian NU Project stand firm in their primary mission of uniting the Asian and Asian-American communities at Northwestern.
But though the project has addressed the egging incident, it remains about a larger purpose. “Of course we support all the talk that’s been going on and we think it’s important for the campus to be more aware of these issues, but we still have a specific purpose of addressing unity within the Asian/Asian-American community,” says Weinberg senior and group organizer Pamela Hung.
Student organizers of the Asian NU Project describe the project as a movement rather than a club or an organization. Although one of the main goals of the project is the unification of the Asian/Asian-American community, the organizers recognize the differences in experiences that Asian-Americans have and do not strive to speak for the community as a whole.
“People are really starting to look at Asian NU Project as representative of the Asian-American community. We are to represent an avenue for Asian voices to be heard, to show how diverse those experiences are,” says Weinberg senior Derek Suen.
The project is the brainchild of a group of Asian-American student leaders inspired by Carolyn Chen, Northwestern’s director of Asian-American studies. Last October Chen invited these students to participate in a focus group on the state of the Asian/Asian-American community at the university.
As this is her first year serving as director of the Asian-American studies department, professor Chen says she wanted to better understand the Asian-American experience at Northwestern.
At this meeting the students identified some of the causes of disunity within the community. Cultural disunity, which can be attributed to the range in background experience found within the group, has resulted in social disunity at the university. Not only is there a general difference between the Asian experience and the Asian-American experience, but there are also ethnic and cultural differences within those two groups that inhibit solidarity.
“A lot of people don’t realize how fragmented our community actually is,” Suen says.
However, the focus group participants realized that there was a common theme tying the unique experiences together: shame.
“The Asian NU Project is about creating pride in the Asian-American culture and it’s about combating shame that I think a lot of Asians feel and it’s also about discussing these issues for the first time on this campus,” SESP senior Chris Nho says.
The organizers have combated this shame by hosting multiple workshops on campus in recent weeks that have each attracted between 30 and 70 participants. These workshops center on storytelling.
“By telling our stories we feel like we can show the community how it does feel to be Asian/Asian-American,” says Huang. “And by telling these stories to each other we build bridges within the community itself.”