Asian Heritage Support Group: Rocking the Boat

If just one person can change the world, imagine what a powerful impact two people can make! Our Asian heritage support group, which for the most part has consisted of Benita Jackson as leader and myself as assistant, has made good progress in tackling the distresses in our lives from an Asian perspective and in moving towards our liberation. At several meetings last summer we were also joined by Sonal Sheth, a South Asian woman who is now making waves in Washington, D.C. Together we have looked at tricky issues of visibility and entitlement: how, for instance, our human desire to be supportive of others sometimes turns into self-invalidation and self-postponement; how the academic pressure to criticize and distrust our own thinking hooks into our cultural messages of 'don't put yourself first' and 'be nice and be silent'; and how the distorted (or simply missing) representation of Asians in popular culture has kept us-but no longer!-from appreciating how beautiful we truly are and how rightfully we deserve to be at the center of our communities. The idea that we are completely valuable, entitled, and integral to this society has been an important source of discharge and empowerment-especially in these days of fundraising scandal, when (once again!) it is suggested that both Asians and Asian Americans are 'foreigners,' and when the questionable political activities of a few individuals are given extensive news coverage because of their 'foreign' racial heritage.

We have also done excellent work on our relationships with our parents; on 'perfectionist' patterns; on discharging the sense of uprootedness or loss that we experienced directly or inherited from older generations; and on noticing our own closeness to each other. Being with other wonderful Asians and noticing how much we want each other is such a contradiction to the patterns of mistrust, 'pride,' 'self-reliance,' and competition that keep us isolated and apart.

It has been particularly interesting for me to see how our Asian issues affect the way we function in other areas: as women and men, as young adults, as members of one economic class or another. While this does make our distresses more complicated to deal with, it's also reassuring to see that our Asianness is completely bound up in every aspect of our lives and is not separate from our humanness.

Jason Baluyut
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA


Last modified: 2022-12-25 10:17:04+00