ITASA

Posts tagged college

Date: Saturday, May 5th, 2012
Time: 6PM - 10PM
Location: UCSD Price Center Ballroom East

Email contact: frank.lin@itasa.org 

TASA at UCSD wishes to spread awareness of beautiful Formosa by presenting our second annual Mr. and Ms. Formosa Culture Pageant.

The pageant will select talented young men and women to compete for the crown of Mr. & Ms. Formosa. The winners will be determined based on talent, intelligence, and their representation of Taiwanese culture. In addition to contestant performances, we will also feature guest performances such as Taiwanese-American singer/songwriter Cynthia Lin and local San Diego based band, The Randoms. Our mission for this event is to recognize college students who embody Taiwanese American culture while also promoting Taiwanese Americans as a whole. We hope that each participant of this event, whether contestant or audience, walks away with a greater knowledge of Taiwan through a captivating and unforgettable night.

Furthermore, Mr. and Ms. Formosa will be a philanthropic event with all proceeds going to Tzu Chi, a non-profit organization originating in Taiwan with roots in community service and disaster relief. We strongly support Tzu Chi in their goals and hope to assist them in their efforts to help those in need.

Pre-sale tickets will be available for $5, and $10 at the door; please contact us to purchase them at the TASA @ UCSD Facebook group!

Congratulations, the acceptance letters are in! Now what do you do? How do you pick a university? Here are some tips on choosing a university that fits you the best.

Location Location Location!

When people say that location is everything they aren’t lying: living close to home and living thousands of miles away makes a difference.  You need to consider flying back and forth around break time, food choices, and weather. East coast winters might not be as easy as you think, especially for students from socal, be prepared for the brutal winters!  If you’re used to being able to drive a couple miles for some Asian breakfast or just walking downstairs, that most likely won’t be an option for you in college if you go anywhere other than California. Cafeterias will be your home and if you move off campus, you’ll be cooking for yourself. However, with all this sad, it’s a great experience to get away from home and travel to another place and live on your own. It might a little tough at first, but the experience is worth it one hundred percent.

Safety/Environment

This plays in with location, so be sure to research on the area around the campus. Some campuses are split in a way where the east campus is better than the west campus or the same with north and south campuses. Consider if your campus is near a large city like Chicago or New York and how this may affect campus life.  At the same time, consider if you want to be close to the bustling city, or live in a college town. 

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“Outrageous!”

“I can’t believe people are still saying things like that today.”

“Are the editors really that oblivious?”

These were some of the comments voiced by my classmates after my presentation in discussion section for an ethnic studies class at Yale. Our lectures and readings that week focused on the history of the racialization of Asian Americans and touched specifically upon the legal, social, and economic exclusion of Chinese migrants and laborers at the turn of the twentieth century. In class, we examined not only the development of Chinatown as a racial, urban space, but also the fictive construction of Chinatown as a place of vice, disease, immorality, crime, and mystery in the popular imagination. These tropes are continuously rehashed even one hundred years later in our media today, from movies like Gangs of New York to movies as innocent as Freaky Friday.

So where do Taiwanese Americans fit into the picture? As someone who is passionate about Asian American history and the Taiwanese American identity, I thought it would be an opportune moment to discuss Jeremy Lin’s rapid ascendance into the media limelight critically in relationship to the history we were learning in class. I pulled up and projected recent incendiary media headlines about Lin and asked my fellow section attendees how the racialization of Asian Americans as a perpetually foreign “Other” one hundred years ago continues to affect Asian Americans today. I also challenged them to think about how his Taiwanese American background plays (or doesn’t play) into the media’s portrayal and scrutiny of his career. Two of the headlines I chose included ESPN’s headline “Chink in the Armor” and FoxSports.com columnist Jason Whitlock’s tweet after the Knicks secured a victory over the Lakers that “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight.”

Perhaps students who voluntarily elect to take an ethnic studies course are predisposed to feel outraged at such headlines and not brush it off as a joke, but my gut feeling is that these prominent media headlines also made many of you feel uncomfortable. One hundred years later, the same, insidious stereotypes about Asian American masculinity (or lack thereof) and foreignness still rear their ugly heads, even when the person in question seems to perfectly embody the American dream – a hard-working, faithful, Harvard-educated son of Taiwanese immigrants who has achieved stunning success in basketball and captured the attention of millions of Americans on television. Why do the media still insist on recycling these stereotypes? Why is it that his success is perceived as so unusual?

These questions, whether we like it or not, have to do with race. The Linsanity phenomenon has exposed faultlines of identity, ethnicity, “Americanness.” We are reminded through these ugly incidents that while we rally around a fellow Taiwanese American, we are not only involved in a collective Asian American struggle, but we also occupy a special niche as Taiwanese Americans. As Taiwanese Americans, our stake in the Asian American identity is different. Due to Taiwan’s unique history and special relationship with the U.S. in the last half century, many of us are sons and daughters of Taiwanese immigrants who came here after U.S. immigration laws were revised to recruit professionals to pursue higher education or specialized careers, giving us access to opportunities for college education and more prospects ourselves. Our contemporary legacy in the popular imagination as the “model minority” with “tiger mothers” and “high-expectations Asian fathers” is not immune from flawed and insidious stereotypes, as the media hubbub around Jeremy Lin has aptly demonstrated.

What does this mean for us and for ITASA? As an intercollegiate network, our voices are strong and deserve to be heard. Popular outcry from Asian American activist groups have demanded apologies from the media and demonstrated that we are a force to be reckoned with. So stay vigilant, stay awesome, and take pride in our collective voice. 

Written by: Christina Lee - East Coast District Chair (Yale University)

The winners were announced at our East Coast Conference, so if you missed out, here are the results!

Editor’s Note: Have you ever wanted to start your own Taiwanese American Students Association (TASA - or anything of the like)? Being Taiwanese American is arguably a completely different experience than being a Taiwanese international student, though sometimes the differences are subtle. Having the initiative to start a cultural club can and should be a daunting task if done properly, but if you can establish a meaningful presence on campus, the sense of accomplishment will be great. Don’t take it from me though, take it from someone who’s done it just this past year! [End Note]

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