ECAASU incorporated the arts into their conference, an area that many feel are underappreciated within our community and a field that carries a stigma to APIA.
Tiffany Nguyen
Daniel became more aware of the everyday experiences of transgender folks from listening to keynote speaker Jaiyah Saelua, the first openly transgendered soccer player to play in a FIFA sanctioned event. She also spoke about accepted non-binary genders in other cultures and societies. Jonathon Sun of our Graduate Advisory Council came out of the conference more aware of the differences between the APIA communities in the Midwest and in the East Coast. He learned that the APIA community is not homogenous across the United States, and
that it seems that some of the East Coast schools have a lot more exposure to the issues than many schools in the Midwest do.
We’re glad that we had this great opportunity to visit our brothers and sisters on the East Coast. Our MAASU ECC members learned a lot and and will be applying what they learned to themselves, their student organizations, and their communities. Jonathon stated that he would use what he learned to improve MAASU, and Tessa spoke about learning about being a mixed-race individual and having a better understanding about the issues that can come with being mixed-race. Tiffany said that she would take all the things she talked about at the conference back to her campus and community to continue the conversations.
We’d like to thank ECAASU for having us, and for organizing and running such an incredible conference. We learned a lot and hope that we can continue working with our sister organization to develop ourselves and our members as advocates and activists for the APIA community.