Distinct Worlds, One Vision

On February 27th & 28th over 1,200 Asian American students came together for an unforgettable conference in New Jersey at Rutgers University. The conference is called ECAASU, which stands for the East Coast Asian American Student Union. ECAASU was founded in 1977 and is the premiere Asian American collegiate conference in the U.S.

So, what did the students actually do at ECAASU? Or should I say what didn't the students do at ECAASU? Both Friday and Saturday were jam-packed with insightful workshops, amazing performances, phenomenal keynote speakers, fun mixers, a career fair and so much more. Each year ECAASU is held at a different university; however, this year's conference had a very unique distinction. Rutgers had a green initiative, which I thought was great! The conference board did its job by cutting down on paper usage, avoiding unnecessary waste and avoiding the usage of non-recyclable products.

__________________________________________________

Friday started at the crack of dawn. Everyone met at 5:30am; however, we didn't hit the road till about 6:30am. Most of us didn't get any sleep the night before because we were either finishing up work or doing last-minute packing. So...as you can see many of us were PTFO (passed the !@$* out)!
It took us 9 long hours to get to New Jersey; we arrived around 3pm, checked in, got situated, headed off to dinner around 4:30pm, and then it was time for the festivities to begin!

Our first workshop was from 6:15pm-7:15pm, and it was hard trying to figure out which one we wanted to attend since there were so many to choose from. Here were some of our options: Asian Pride!, Breaking down the Barrier: Stomping out Stigma about Mental Health in the Asian American Community, Asian American Political Identity, FOBs, ABCs, and Everything in Between: Inner Discrimination in Chinese American Culture, Shmoozin' & Boozin'-A Workshop on Etiquette, and many more.

After the workshop, we had the opening ceremony from 7:45pm-9:00pm and following was the entertainment till about 11:30pm. The entertainment included performances by: Tim be Told (recent winners of UVa's 2008 Battle of the Bands), Rutgers Chinese Dance Troupe, FR3SH Dance Troupe, LLC., Johnnyphlo (a local Korean-American Hip-Hop/R&B artist), East Coast Lambda Phi Epsilon Step, Kappa Phi Lambda & Pi Delta Psi Step, Rutgers University NATYA (traditional/modern Indian dance group), Rutgers University Raas and Garba Association (a dance group celebrating the Gujurati culture), and last but not least, SercISCompany (an upcoming dance company at RU).
The performances were great! It started off the conference with a BANG, especially because Danny Cho was the host that night. For those of you who don't know Danny Cho, he is a comedian who has been on Mad TV and landed a role on the Superbowl's Bud Light commercial.

Friday night's festivities ended around 12 am, however, that didn't mean that the night had to end. Since everyone attending the conference stayed at the same hotel, most of the students stayed up to mingle, hang out and relax with other students that they had just met. For many, the night didn't end until about 4am, and breakfast was only 4 hours away, so you can imagine that everyone was sleep deprived. But honestly, to me, that's what a conference is all about, and in the end, it's all worth it. Why would you want to spend the whole day sleeping when you have all of these great opportunities to learn and network with amazing people? I've attended numerous conferences in the past year and I have learned to prepare myself for how much sleep I am not going to get. I feel like that's part of the whole experience; a conference is not the same unless you: get five hours or less of sleep, have a full day jam-packed with great workshops and keynote speakers, and meet incredible people. The picture above is of students from ODU, UF, Temple and the Coast Guard Academy. Again, meeting people from all over the country is the best part about conferences.

Saturday was even more hectic then Friday; the day started at 8am and ended around 5am Sunday morning. We had two more workshops to attend, a career fair, mixers, lunch, dinner, opening keynote speakers, closing ceremonies, entertainment, and of course, an afterparty. One of the best parts of Saturday was listening to all of the inspirational keynote speakers. The speakers were: Phil Yu, Cathy Bao Bean, John Liu, Pooja Makhijani, Philip Poczik, and the editors of Secret Identities who were Jeff Yang, Keith Chow, Parry Shen, and Jerry Ma. Two of my favorite speakers were Phil Yu and Cathy Bao Bean.

Phil Yu, the founder and editor of AngryAsianMan.com. For those of you who don't know what AngryAsianMan.com is, it is an Asian-American news/culture/opinion blog. Yu uses humor along with criticism to blog about the latest news and issues in the Asian Pacific-Islander American (APIA) community.

Cathy Bao Bean was my ultimate favorite speaker. When she came onto the stage, I thought she was the cutest elderly lady that I had ever seen. Along with that, she had a very witty sense of humor and kept me laughing the whole time. Cathy is the author of The Chopsticks-Fork Principle, A Memoir and Manual and co-author of The Chopsticks-Fork Principle x 2, A Bilingual Reader for ESL and CFL learners.

Saturday night ended with entertainment by Danny Cho, three awesome spoken word artists named Giles Li, Bao Phi, and Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai along with performers from an Asian-American theatre company called hereandnow. The performances were great! But Bao Phi was the best! I guess the reason why I liked him the best is because he is Vietnamese, and his poetry was written in English with snippets of Vietnamese, which made it so much more funny. He is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and was a National Poetry Slam individual finalist. In fact, he is the first Vietnamese-American poet that I know of, and I love his poetry!

After a long day of attending workshops, listening to speakers, and enjoying the wonderful performances, it was time for the students to have some fun of their own, or should I say, "wyl out!" The afterparty was just what the students needed. As I said before in one of my posts, "work hard and play hard."

I have to commend the ECAASU 2009 Board for putting together a phenomenal conference. Taking into consideration that these are students in college, and they do have classes and grades to worry about, it was surprising they were able to pull everything together. Below is a picture of me and a good friend of mine, Caspar Wang. Caspar was one of the co-directors, and I must say, "I don't know how you do it, Caspar." Caspar is taking 21 credits this semester, which are seven classes, and he somehow managed to balance his classes, school organizations, and ECAASU. To me, he's kinda like Superman because I definitely could not pull everything together as well as he did.

Just to reiterate the theme of my blog; being involved and attending conferences helps you expand and broaden your horizons. This just proves that there is more to college then getting drunk and partying every weekend.

A special thanks to Rick Pascual and Maimounah Masudi for letting me use their pictures!