SAMEAPI Awareness Now! Events
(South Asian Middle Eastern Asian
Pacific Islander Awareness Now!)

SAMEAPI Awareness Now! Timeline
Ongoing for the month of April
Toyon Meadow

Take a stroll down Toyon Meadow and view this year’s SAMEAPI Awareness Now! timeline honoring inspirational SAMEAPI women! This timeline is dedicated to the SAMEAPI women who sought and brought change to South Asian, Middle Eastern, Asian Pacific Islander women: actors, artists, athletes, comedians, designers, engineers, politicians, and many more! SAMEAPI honor those women who paved the way for future generations of SAMEAPI women to leave their mark on the world.

SAMEAPI Awareness Now! Kick Off
12:15 pm, Thursday, April 2, 2009, Suzanne Adams Plaza

Come and join us as we celebrate many exciting events honoring our heritage! Guest artist, Yoshie Ono, is a calligrapher who teaches and competes in calligraphy competitions nationwide and in Japan. She will do a demonstration with large characters and then will be happy to write people’s names in Japanese on smaller cards after her demonstration.

Come and sample delicious offerings of Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine!

Virtual Gallery
5:00 pm, Thursday, April 2, 2009, Founders Hall

Join SAMEAPI as we drop some knowledge through a virtual gallery in the Founders lobby. Soak up some knowledge as we address issues of Orientalism, representation in media and entertainment, API current issues, and global conflicts. Take a second look at images and phrases that you would never suspect have offensive undertones for the SAMEAPI community.

Dinner Honoring SAMEAPI Awareness Now! Month
5:00–7:00 pm, Thursday, April 2, 2009, Founders Hall

Join the Mills Community as celebrate our heritage with delicious food!

Dinner brought to you by Bon Appetit.

Guest Speaker, Lora Jo Foo
Book Launch for her new book, Earth Passages: Journeys Through Childhood
7:00 pm, Thursday, April 2, 2009, Student Union

Lora Jo Foo is a passionate advocate for workers' rights and a gifted colleague. She will show us another side of her compassion and gifts as well as her struggles, as she reads from her new book, "Earth Passages" Journey Through Childhood." Consisting of 28 vignettes and 53 color nature photographs, this book tells the story of the author growing up in the inner city ghetto of San Francisco’s Chinatown, in poverty, in a housing project, at the aged of 11 sewing in a garment sweatshop. In the girl's rare escapes into the woods she discovers a magical world so unlike the ghetto in which she lives. The stories from childhood are paired with color nature photographs taken by the author as an adult. The stories are terse, pithy and powerful. They transform and imbue the very beautiful nature photographs with a much more complicated, almost bittersweet meaning.

Lora Jo Foo, author, photographer is the daughter of a garment worker. She wanted to tell the story of the kids of immigrant women whose overworked mothers were absent for most of the waking hours of their young lives. By telling her own story, she tell theirs also.

Her first story crystalized one night in 1989 as she lay in a tent, writing by the beam of a flashlight, during a three-week trek in the Helambu-Langtang region of Nepal. Thereafter, she eked out a story or two once a year, simply because the memories were painful to recall. It took over ten years to write the short stories in Earth Passages.

Becoming a photographer was pure serendipity. Her husband at the time handed her his camera during a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. She was surprised by the quality of her first few rolls. At first, she was fascinated with trees, particularly trees that pushed through granite, gripped onto hillsides and cliffs, or scraped out a life in dry desert. After studying and re-studying these pictures, she realized that she was photographing her early childhood. Her photos are about her surviving her childhood, of growing up in an impoverished family of eight, in a federal housing project in San Francisco's Chinatown. Here, in the second most densely populated area of the country, at the age of 10, she even caught tuberculosis from a classmate at the age 10, a disease mostly eradicated in the rest of America. Green Tree Among Hoodoos, the cover photograph, is a metaphor about young living things surviving harsh, barren environments. Thus, photography is an inner journey to reach the deepest part of her. She had to photograph just as she had to write her childhood stories.

She was inspired to publish this unlikely mixture of childhood stories and nature photographs because while the stories were painful to write and read, the photographs heal.

Lora Jo Foo, lawyer, activist, and community organizer, a garment worker at age 11 and a union organizer for eight years in the garment and hotel industries, she became an attorney representing low wage workers in sweatshop industries. Lora Jo litigated numerous groundbreaking cases on their behalf. She co-founded Sweatshop Watch and the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum.

In 2002, Lora Jo published her first book, Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns and Responsive Human and Civil Rights Advocacy. Lora Jo stopped litigating in 2000 to return to her roots as an organizer and to school where she received her Masters in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2002. Most recently she was the organizing director of a major California union. In 2004 and 2008, she was the National Voting Rights Protection Coordinator for the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

Film Screening and Discussion, "Caramel," Nadine Labaki, 2007
7:00 pm, Monday, April 6, 2009, Faculty Staff Lounge

Caramel is the first feature film by Lebanese director/actress Nadine Labaki. It revolves around the intersecting lives of five Lebanese women. Layale works in a beauty salon in Beirut along with two other women, Nisrine and Rima. The film follows the three of them and a select few of their beauty salon patrons. The film was distributed in over 40 countries, easily becoming the most internationally acclaimed and exposed Lebanese film to date. Labaki's film is unique for not showcasing a war-ravaged Beirut but rather a warm and inviting locale where people deal with universal issues.

After the movie, there will be a short discussion about themes addressed in the film led by the Muslim Student Association.

Keynote Speaker, Helen Zia
"The Coming 'Minority' Majority and other Diversity Challenges: Notes of an Asian American Feminist "
7:00 pm, Thursday, April 9, 2009, Student Union

The American people are turning more colored, the queers are getting married, the feminists are still marching—what other evils are lurking as "minorities" become the majority in these contemporary times that have been labeled "post-Civil Rights," "post-feminist". Award-winning author and activist Helen Zia, daughter of Chinese immigrants, shares her personal observations and stories to show how a faith in our common humanity can challenge old beliefs and bring diverse communities together for human rights and social justice.

Helen Zia is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000) and a finalist for the prestigious 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. She is also coauthor, with Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me (Hyperion, 2002) about the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for China in the “worst case since the Rosenbergs.”

A second generation Chinese American, Helen has been both an activist and a journalist throughout her life. She began her activism as a student in high school and college during the heyday of civil rights, anti-war and women’s movements. Later, as she worked as a magazine writer, editor and investigative reporter, her special passion involved stories of ordinary people in pursuit of social change and justice. She became the Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine, where she received numerous journalism awards. Her investigation of date rape at the University of Michigan led to campus demonstrations and an administrative overhaul of its policies, while her research on women who join neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations provoked new thinking on the relationship between race, gender, and sexual orientation in hate-motivated violence.

Helen has been outspoken on issues ranging from human rights, war and peace to racial profiling and countering hate violence. In 1997 she helped author a complaint and gave testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights against Congress, the Democratic and Republican National Committees and the news media for racially discriminatory treatment against Asian Americans. Ms. Zia traveled to Beijing in 1995 to the UN Fourth World Congress on Women as part of a journalists of color delegation. Her work on the Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is documented in the Academy Award nominated film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" Helen wrote some of the earliest essays linking Asian American and lesbian/gay communities to such issues as same-sex marriage.

Ms. Zia received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Law School of the City University of New York in 2002 for bringing important matters of law into public view. As the current board chair of the Women’s Media Center, founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and. Gloria Steinem, she initiated a campaign to keep the media spotlight on war crimes committed by US soldiers in Iraq against 14 year old Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi, her family and other Iraqi civilians. She is a “Writer-In-Residence” of New York University and an “Expert Fellow” in University of Southern California’s Justice and Journalism program. She is a long-time member and former New York Chapter president of the Asian American Journalists Association.

A graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Ms. Zia was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar and a member of the university's first graduating class of women. She quit medical school after completing two years, then worked as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, after which she discovered her life’s work as a writer.

This event supported by the George and Helen Hedley Speakers Fund.

Poetry for Peace Evening, Guest Poet Dr. Elmaz Abinader
7:00 pm, Thursday, April 16, 2009, Faculty Staff Lounge

back to top

Taiko Drumming with Emeryville Taiko Drummers!
7:00 pm, Wednesday, April 22, 2009, Student Union

Taiko drumming is an exciting modern artform with ancient roots. With origins in the religious ceremonies and folk festivals of Japan, it has experienced a worldwide renaissance that began in the 60s and continues to grow today. Emeryville Taiko was initiated as an Oakland taiko class for children by Yuri Morita with Susan Horn as her assistant under the guidance of Grand Master Seiichi Tanaka, founder of San Francisco Taiko Dojo. When Yuri decided to go to Japan, Susan Horn became instructor of the group. Not long after, Susan moved the group to a 3,000 square foot warehouse in Emeryville which was transformed by group members from a dirty and dingy warehouse to a dojo with a bamboo-floored performance stage. Senior drum builder Jenny Fuss also began workshops in taiko building, which resulted in more than 20 drums, all hand-built by Emeryville Taiko members.

The history of Taiko is interwoven in the fabric of Japanese history. Regarded as sacred since ancient times, the drum was first used to drive away evil spirits and pests harmful to crops. It was believed that by imitating the sound of thunder, the spirit of rain would be forced into action. At harvest time, Taiko was joyfully played in thanks for a bountiful crop. Today, this spiritual aspect of Taiko has faded with the modernization of Japan. What was once an integral part of daily life is now just a festival relic.

Taiko drums are handmade by professional drum makers in Japan. It is believed that the spirit of the trees from which the wood came, as well as the spirit of the builders of the drum, and even the performers who played them over the years come to embody each drum. The sound of today’s performance comes from the spiritual bond between the performer and this deep tradition.

Karaoke Night!
7:00 pm, Friday, April 24, 2009, Student Union

If you love to sing and you've always known you were an amazing talent waiting to be discovered, this is your chance!! Bring your best singing voice and get ready to wow us all at Karaoke Night, Friday April 24 at 7 pm in the Student Union. Even if you don't love to sing, come by to support your friends and eat some delicious refreshments! Sponsored by APISA, MSA, and SAMECAO in honor of SAMEPAI Heritage Month.

Spoken Word Artist Ruby Veridiano-Ching
7:00 pm, Thursday, April 30, 2009, Student Union

Join us as we welcome acclaimed spoken word artist, Ruby Veridiano-Ching to the Mills campus for a socially conscious poetry slam! She will perform spoken word in accordance with themes of social justice and identity conflicts.

Ruby Veridiano-Ching is a poet, arts educator, VJ/television host, performing artist, model, fashionista, and former  (and sole female) member of acclaimed spoken word collective iLL-Literacy.

Ruby has performed and facilitated writing workshops in venues throughout the United States and Europe, and in 2007, was featured in the nationally-televised Re:Vision campaign, as well as on Common and MTV"s "Minute Campaign" February 2008. She has worked with esteemed arts organizations such as Youthspeaks Bay Area, 826 Valencia, ODC Dance Theatre, and We Got Issues! of Brooklyn, NYC. Her performance work has been showcased in numerous festivals, including Hip-Hop Theater Festival Bay Area, the National Asian American Theatre Festival of NYC, and the Grounded? Festival by Intersection for the Arts in SF.

Ruby holds the experience as a VJ/television host for music channel MYX, as well as an assistant at Jive Records in NYC. She graduated with a B.A. in Sociology of World Development and Communications from UC Davis, and also completed studies at the Universita per Stranieri in Siena, Italy.

Born in Manila, raised in Sacramento, and currently residing in Oakland, California, she continues live love through her art and community.

Sponsors for SAMEAPI events
Events are co-sponsored by the Asian Pacific Islander Sisterhood Alliance, Muslim Student Alliance, South Asian Middle Eastern Cultural Awareness Organization, Ethnic Studies Department, Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Women's Studies Program, Public Policy Program, Journalism Program, Office of Student Diversity Programs, Office of Spiritual and Religious Life, Office of Student Activities, and Associated Students of Mills College.

Mills College Heritage Months are supported in part by the Ethnic Studies Fund. To learn about and donate to the Fund, please click here: Ethnic Studies Fund. Many thanks for your generosity in support of Ethnic Studies and students of color at Mills.

back to top