Dr. Julie Park Featured in WTOP News Article: "How to Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the DC Area"

On April 29, 2022, Dr. Julie Park, Director of AAST, was featured in a WTOP News article titled, “How to Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the DC Area.”

The U.S. Census defines Asian as a person “having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.” Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander is defined as a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa or other Pacific Islands.

That’s a lot of very different places, and Julie Park, the director of the University of Maryland’s Asian American Studies program, said it gets really difficult to pick out a single Asian culture.

“Is there something uniquely Asian or it is much more ethnic-specific?” Park said. Besides very broad regional origins, she said, “There’s really nothing — there’s not language, there’s not religion — there’s really nothing that ties us.”

That said, the term Asian American came about in the 1960s as a way of organizing for economic and social justice, a way of “political mobilizing” that has been really helpful and useful for the members of the group, Park said.

In May 2020, PBS aired “Asian Americans,” a series about how Asians shaped the U.S. and their ongoing roles. It aired during the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when incidents of anti-Asian hate started creeping up in the U.S.

Park said the documentary is one way to understand a little bit more national context or historical context of how Asians helped shaped the U.S.

Read the full article.