More than 100 University of Michigan students gathered in the Michigan Union Tuesday evening to celebrate the start of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with an opening ceremony and art fair. The event was organized by the Office of Multi Ethnic Student Affairs with a theme “Mine All Mine,” and featured LSA Professor Tung-Hui Hu as a guest speaker, as well as student performances of songs and original poetry.
MESA program manager Pa Houa Xiong said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that the theme, which was inspired by the Mitski song “My Love is Mine all Mine,” was designed to encourage students to reconnect with their Asian identities and share love for their community while still practicing self-love, and was informed by input from students during the planning stage.
“I really wanted to center student voices,” Xiong said. “I asked a question of what are important things to you right now? What applies to your identity? And a lot of the things that came up were reconnecting to our roots, our Asian identity, as well as the reclamation of land and solidarity and unity. So through that we generated a theme called ‘Mine All Mine,’ sharing our love and retaining what’s ours.”
At the event, Hu shared what being Asian American meant to him and the pressures of retaining the label.
“I’ve been trying to understand what it means to celebrate AAPI Heritage Month as someone who has struggled to claim anything,” Hu said. “To speak here is for me to lean into the weakness of my Asian identity. But I’m hoping that that may actually be a good thing in disguise because identity has increasingly become a tool for capitalism to capture ourselves and lock us into its operations. … It’s the same neoliberal logic that companies use to hire one or two token persons of Color to diversify their management, but change nothing structurally.”
LSA freshman Sarayu Uppara said in an interview with The Daily…
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