InvASIAN of the Cultural Sort

Instead of the usual exam with 75 questions or a ten page essay, our Asian American Culture class went in a more dynamic direction for our midterm: cultural guerrillas with the intent to spread knowledge about the 1968 strike and to create an Asian American presence on campus. We split into four groups: visual/propaganda, fashion, skit, and poetry. My group (Just So Sick Girls + The Warriors) executed the poetry part by writing lines from poems and quotes about the SFSU strike of 1968 on boards all over campus. To cover more ground, each person paired up with one other group member and hit different buildings. Stephanie and I did our "invading" on the first and second floor of the Humanities building. One of the quotes we used was "Schools continue to be factories of the status quo, where children are shunted into prefabricated futures based on their class, gender, sexuality, and color" (from "A Letter to the Campus Community From the third world Liberation Front" written by TWLF participants). As it neared 8:00 a.m., students started filling the classrooms, so we began writing on the chalkboards in the bathrooms (ladies rooms only, of course). Watch the awesome video that Gelline put together for a better visual of what our group did.

In the beginning I dreaded waking up early to be on campus before classes started (I already get less than six hours of sleep each night), but I really enjoyed participating in the InvASIAN and was glad to see our whole group putting a lot of effort into it as well. The experience was quite thrilling—writing as fast as we can to lessen the possibility of someone walking in while we were still inside (to avoid the awkwardness) and opening doors to a crack and peeping into rooms to make sure they weren't occupied. With all the rooms we did, I'm sure that we raised a lot of awareness about the Asian American Studies panel and what happened in '68. Later while marching towards Malcolm X Plaza with the whole class, I felt like we were really striking, chanting "On strike—we're gonna shut it down."