September 7, 1998
Last Wednesday, we had our first “official” APATH meeting. It was a really weird experience for me. This was because all the people on our floor were there, not as floormates, but as classmates. I mean, I do take classes with some of the people on our floor, but I never took a class where all the people were from my floor. It was a new experience for me.
The things that we talked about during class were weird also. It wasn’t that I never took a course on our history, because I did take Ethnic Studies 41AC last year, but it was new in a sense that it was talking about issues that affect the Asian community. The Ethnic Studies class that I took concentrated more on African American, Chicano, and American Indian cultures rather than the Asian American culture. Therefore, I was completely shocked at how oppressed we really were. When Tony lectured on the history of all the different Asian American cultures, I was surprised to hear the different laws that were made to hurt us. I did have a vague idea on what happened with the Japanese Americans during World War II, with the internment camps, but I never knew the real story on all Asian cultures. They went through many struggles and fought through the discrimination so we, their children, could have a better life. I was never in a position where I would understand that kind of situation, so the meeting made me really proud for them. I was also surprised at how passionate the APATH members felt about the subject. I had assumed that our generation were so blind about our history and that we wouldn’t care about our ancestors, but from the comments made in class, I was wrong about my assumptions.