 Breathing in seven generations, we bring a circle to this present moment and a sigh together as we open this plenary of the Fifth National Asian-American Theater Conference and Festival. Thank you, and I now pass the baton to Snehal Desai, our artistic director of East West Plairs. And this is Leslie B. Sheet, everyone. We're going to recognize everyone, but can we give Leslie, who is our conference organizer? Leslie mentioned my name is Snehal, and I'm a member of the conference. When Leslie and I, with Tim and the Kata Board, began to program this conference, what we all knew we wanted was to overwhelm with the success of our stories. To create a space for us all to talk and to shake the ground on which we stand, but to also make sure we all got to know each other as artists, and to make sure that no one anywhere in our field could say, I don't know an Asian-American playwright, or director, or designer, or performer. So that we hope you leave this conference today able to share our stories and the stories of our colleagues. So that anyone here or in the country, basically anyone with internet, should be able to find an Asian-American artist. To that end, today we are going to make our box lunch session, and artists meet and greet. So after you grab your food, just go to the lobby area of Hey Padden, and find a name tag where you can identify your profession, and hopefully find a new playwright, or designer, or director to begin the conversation with. Also at the happy hour today, between 4 and 5.30, at hearsay, if you have not been there, is a great time for affinity space gatherings. So feel free to organize groups there. I know the South Asians, will we be eating there? Now we want to make sure we are making seismic ripples here, but also sharing that with our broader community. So I hope you have all had a moment of seismic change already. If not, you have about four more days, so please be able to look out. But will everyone please pull out your cell phone now? Yeah, we are going to defy logic and pull out our theaters. Our cell phones in a theater now, and turn them on. So we want to at this exact moment digitally create a seismic wave on Facebook and Twitter, with our observations, and tweet or post a moment of seismic discovery for you, using the hashtag KataOSF. So please take a moment to do that. I'm going to give you a couple of examples for myself while you are thinking or doing that. So number one, for me, one of the things that I learned is that in a 90 second interchange on stage, a talented playwright like Queen Nguyen can do more to educate about Yellow Face than any panel or discussion. Number two, our shit looks good on these stages here. So thank you to Bill at OSF for inviting us. Thank you to all of our amazing artists. I thought Hot Asian Everything was an awesome evening. And so it is great, and we need to continue to make sure we are supporting our artists and communities so that they are getting the support they need, and that all artists get better the more work they do. So what we need to do is make sure in this city and every city we show up for each other at our theaters. Number three, for me, thanks to Kathy Shea and her wonderful session, if there's not enough seats at the table, pull up more seats. As Roberta Uno said, we are now the majority. This is a whisper to roar moment. We are no longer the counter narrative. We are the narrative. And the final two moments for me was also in that session was sitting there and saying, prestige is not always the biggest theater or the theater with the most seats. Prestige is working with our elders, or working in the spaces where our elders would have worked, where Frank Chin and Mako and Nobu and Tisa and Rick Shiyomi and Jorge and Gordon Davidson and Zelda Fischandler have worked, and they are all our forefathers and foremothers. They have all shaped this wonderful profession that we lived in, and we should appreciate all of them. And finally, I keep going back to Amelia Katchapera's wonderful quote that she has, a Buddhist quote that she has mentioned throughout this conference. If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, travel together. So let's take these remaining days to continue to make seismic shifts and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you. Turn it over to Danny Britt, who is now going to read a poem that he wrote inspired by the conference. Thank you. Thank you. I was just told I was doing this like 10 minutes ago. So this was inspired by the really beautiful exercise that Leslie led us through in one of the sessions yesterday, which I think you all just did just now, and I came in late. So this was sort of my experience of that. This is called Seven Generations. Breathe back. Seven generations. Feel my feet on the floor. This ancestral land is not my ancestral land. Breathe. My ancestral land is seven lands. Breathe. My grandfather would say, with one ass, you can't be in seven places. So I'm trying to feel the floor. Breathe into my parents' minds' eyes. And I find I can. My father, New York, 1970s, hair waving long, aviator glasses, this leather jacket, the store on Long Island, selling christening dresses to Mrs. Liadakis and Mrs. Scariotis. Breathe. My mother waiting up for her father to read Khalil Gibran, holding her mother's head crying in her lap in the bathroom, Borrecas and Bamiya and Bustelo. I've seen those pictures, sat in those apartments, tasted the food. I know it well. It feels like home. It doesn't hurt. I can smile at it, tease out the dialogue. Breathe. Back to my grandparents. I know it less. Have to imagine more. But I find that I can see out their faces, feel their clothes on my skin, their cities around me, walking arm in arm through the pre-war snow. My grandfather, posing shirtless with the platoon somewhere in the Philippines, writing letters back home to his best girl. Back, my abuelo, diving for coins, selling loose cigarettes, running errands for the working girls, drinking coffee through a sugar cube that my mom strained through a stocking. Abuela on the beach, smiling on the boat, crying, writing letters back home. Baki, it's cold. All the fruit is hard and all the buildings look like jails. Breathe. And I find, I'm choking now, the closeness and the loss battling behind my eyes. Back, three generations, great grandparents, the movies are stills now and sepia, but real, still real and huge. Fleeting images, nothing much, but bursting. Sitting in a backyard in the new country, watching the grandchildren, Schlivovitz and horseradish sandwiches, lying on a cot in some tenement under the weight of everything lost, everything they took, the shoe factory, the silver, the dignity. Breathe. And this is a fever now, the loss enormous. And how do I feel so torn from these memories? Not mine, the Pazar, the Malecón, the Cal, but please let me stay here with this exquisite pain. Breathe back further. Great, great grandparents. And I try and I find, I can't. There are no memories here, no smells, no language. The boatman holds up his hand. I can't go on. My breath finds nothing. The pain slips away like undertow. I'm losing loss now, numb. These are all pictures from museums and novels and that man is just some man. These are not our features or our photographs. A distant voice beckons me back further. Four, five, six generations, but they are indistinguishable. A pale sea of theoretical diaspora, generic past, empty and endless, and I am alone again. And as I surrender to the void, a voice emerges, singing soft, a song I know from who knows when. And a dim light fades up on a tablecloth and slowly, gently, they materialize, young and old, around the table, singing each other into being. And the details are hazy and anachronistic, I'm sure, but I know they are my ancestors, the seventh generation, and the song asks seven times, who knows, who knows, who knows, who knows, who knows, who could know or ever understand, but we sing praises and I find my voice joins theirs in the living dead language I'm still learning. Que en su pie se entendiese, alabar al dió, querense cual es el uno. Resist. I thought we had to bring the art into this room. And thank you to all the open mic participants. You are awesome. I have the great honor right now introducing Bill Roush. And I could go through, you know, his usual bio, but I just want to share a little bit of my personal experience. I knew him first through Cornerstone Theater. And when I learned about Cornerstone, this was as we were developing a piece regarding the Japanese internment. I began to learn about them and I had been to some of their events prior to that, a couple years before when they had just started to set down in Los Angeles. And what I learned was that they had gone to where they got their first grant, and they started to make theater. And then they started to make theater and set down in rural areas or in towns where there was no theater. And I suddenly understood what Cornerstone meant, that they set the Cornerstone so theater could live there, so that when they stepped away, the community with autonomy could continue. And I am so grateful that you will get to hear his remarks today as we move into our program here for this plenary. Bill brings that tremendous heart and wisdom as he traversed the landscape of this country and brought it here to Oregon Shakespeare where he is making seismic shifts. So Bill, please, will you take the stage so I can hug you? I go to theater. It's really lovely to be with you this morning. I am so humbled and honored to have OSF hosting this conference and this festival. The gift of trust from Cata to OSF in asking us to co-host the festival and have it here in Ashland was pretty overwhelming. And it's been two years of planning and two years of non-stop learning for all of us who are part of the festival, the Shakespeare Festival. And I can tell you right now how ever many years I am in this job and I hope it's a lot of years, this event of these 10 days is going to be on a very, very short list of things that I am most proud to have had happen while I was artistic director. This is a major, major event for our company and a great honor. I'm going to start the litany of people to be thanked because it's such a long list. There are so many organizers from Cata and from OSF who have led to this but even though Snehal stole my thunder a little bit, I do want to give a special shout out to Leslie Ishii. She's over these two years. She's of course our conference organizer and producer and she was recently elected to the Cata board as I think you know. But the best part of all is that I've gotten to see Leslie hanging out on the bricks at Ashland and my kids and my husband. We've all been able to see her a lot and that's been another great gift that Cata has brought to Southern Oregon. My first ever project as artistic director at OSF was a Sanskrit play called The Clay Cart, The Little Clay Cart. And it was part of a larger commitment. So I had directed that play in 2008 and it was part of a larger commitment to expand what we defined as the classical canon. The classics don't just come from Europe and the United States but that in fact there is classic dramatic literature from all over the world. I was really, really clear as director that this classic play, this 2500 year old classic play should be interpreted like our other classics which means it should be interpreted multi-racially. Our Shakespeare's and other classics. And you know that was a really good intention. And it came from a place of good intention but it is a decision, I'm getting a chuckle already, but it's a decision that is of course rooted in the mistaken notion which is rooted in white privilege and my white privilege that European and American classics are somehow on an even footing with classics from other parts of the world in the United States. That it's an equivalent to ask an actor of color to play a role originally conceived for a white actor in the Shakespeare play let's say or even a South Asian actor to play Emily Webb in our town as Mahira Kakar did in Che Yu's staging of our town on our outdoor stage that first season. Those things are equivalent to asking a white actor or even a black actor or a Latino actor to play a world originally conceived as an Asian character. I don't need to tell all of you in this room that those things are not equivalent and that it's not the same thing. So I've been on a real journey over these many years including at the last two TCG conferences ago cut to board members absolutely grilling me about whether or not it was appropriate to have OSF host this conference in this festival. And so with all this said I want to make a commitment right here and now to as we continue on this journey as a learning organization to not ever produce work at OSF that unthinkingly propagates the unfortunate and destructive tradition of Yellow Face. So my colleague Mika told you and what I hear was a really great great set of remarks on Monday. I was away for the open plenary on Monday because of the unexpected death of a friend. I really hated missing that launch of this event. I hated not being able to hear from my amazing friend Roberto Uno and to just not witness it all starting but I really had to be with my friends and with the family of my friend who had passed away including his young children. It was a time of great pain but it was also a time of great love and it reminded me just how much our time on this planet however much any of us has is a gift. So I want to close my brief remarks this morning by turning to the really esteemed veterans in this room the brilliant early career theater artists in this room and all of us that are hopefully somewhere in between and to say that you all have made a powerful choice to come together over these days. You know that we are stronger through collective action. You know that we are only going to turn the tide on racism and other forms of bias in the American theater together as a community. You're gathering together to engage in deep challenging conversations to share cutting-edge work with one another and with OSF's audience. Your commitment to community is all living proof to me that you are taking the precious gift of whatever time we have of our brief lives and you're cherishing that gift. You're using that gift wisely. You're harnessing it thoughtfully and rigorously and lovingly to leave the world a better place and a more just place than we found it. It is an honor to learn from you, to work with you and it is a privilege to be in your company and good morning and thank you my colleagues. Good morning. My name is Roger Tang. I am a... As many of you know, I'm the editor of the Asian American Theater Review but I'm also the executive director of Port Quilt Productions in Seattle, Washington and that makes me a Pacific Northwesterner and knowing that our next guest was born and raised in Seattle it is my honor and pleasure to introduce Mari Watanabe. Mari currently serves as the program director of Leadership Portland with the Portland Business Alliance and as executive director of Partners in Diversity a nonprofit whose mission is to help employers recruit, support and retain professionals of color in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Mari also serves on the City of Beaverton's Diversity Advisory Board Washington County Cultural Coalition Visitors for Culture and Arts Diversity Board National Veterans Network plus many others. Mari currently serves as chair of the Oregon Commission of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs a position she was appointed to by Governor Kitsaber in July 2017 May introduce Mari Watanabe. Thank you. I'm here today I want to thank Kata for inviting me down and also I want to do a really short shout out to Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a longtime supporter of my organization Partners in Diversity so I'm really thrilled to be here. But I'm really here to introduce our keynote speaker she's an awesome woman, leader, Japanese American Karen Narasaki is an American civil rights leader and human rights activist for over 20 years she has served as the former president and executive director of the Asian American Advancing Justice AAJC one of the nation's premier civil rights organizations she also founded and chaired the Asian American Media Coalition which has worked with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC to increase the number of Asian Americans and other minorities in front of and behind the camera she currently serves as the chair of the Asian American Diversity Advisor Council for Comcast and BCU and also has served as the co-chair of Nielsen's Asian American Advisor Council in July 2014 President Barack Obama appointed Karen she served as commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights she is a nationally recognized seismic shifter on diversity and affirmative action immigration and immigration integration adult literacy and language access media diversity and telecommunications access race relations, voting rights and census and data collection no wonder you have to do Zumba keep up that stamina prior to her post at AAJC she served as the Washington DC representative to the Japanese American Citizen League Washingtonian magazine named her as one of 100 most influential women in the nation's capitol she received a JD from the University of California Los Angeles School of Law and she was born in my hometown of Seattle so please welcome Karen Narasaki good morning everyone I'm really excited to be here at ConFest to hear from Asian American theater leaders and artists my brother is an actor in a playwright who's been passionate about theater since we were in high school his wife is an actress who has produced many of his plays and his daughter having graduated from college is now following in her parents footsteps so ConFest feels like family to me as a civil and human rights advocate I've often felt that my brother and I share the same mission to tell stories that touch people's hearts that challenges them to expand their thinking and empowers them to heal and grow my advocacy around media is a push to get more of the stories of our families and communities told James Baldwin once said the great face of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us our unconsciously controlled by it history is literally present in all that we do while I was growing up I would hear my mom talking about the discrimination she faced at the local utility company I would hear my dad talk about how real estate agents in Seattle would not show them the nicer homes in the neighborhoods with the better schools because of racial covenants that barred orientals from being able to own homes there like many Japanese Americans of my generation my commitment to civil and human rights is born out of the World War II incarceration of my parents and their families for the crime of looking like the enemy forced from their homes as teenagers the internment was never spoken of when I was young I learned about the detention camps in high school and went home to ask my parents is this true? the emotional response was searing my dad was yelling, my mom was crying I asked my dad how America could do this to its citizens and he told me it was because our community was not powerful enough to defend ourselves and because of too few Americans were willing to stand up for us as Congress subsequently found it was a failure of political leadership in a time of wartime hysteria something we feel parasely close to repeating today in a world where we are perpetually at war the fight for redress led to my belief in the power of theater Japanese American playwrights began to write about the internment and produced plays this validated the experience of over 120,000 Americans and sparked debate and discussion in homes like mine whose parents had been silent trying to forget trying to focus on the next generation my parents, my grandmother, my aunties they of course wanted to see these plays because Ken was in it and that opened up a space for them to share their own stories this public exposure was painful but it was healing and ultimately empowering the ability to tell one's story to share the sting of betrayal to lay bare the injustice that few Americans had any knowledge of is critical to bringing together any movement and I believe it ultimately helped to lead to the passage of redress with the Civil Liberties Act and the Korm Novus Decisions and Kormatsu and Hirabayashi denouncing the internment Minya Sui, who you'll hear about later today sadly passed away before he could be fully vindicated but now his story is also being told I grew up at a time when Asian Americans in television and movies was extremely rare I remember the thrill of seeing George Takei on the tar track for the first time and I remember the validation I found when I saw the flower drum song even though it was about Chinese Americans in Chinatown, San Francisco I loved musicals and it was the first time I saw Asian Americans singing and dancing and the first time I saw an Asian American on screen a woman who was confident about being an all-American female even though she was not blonde or blue-eyed because of my brother I've had a front row seat to the exclusion of Asian Americans from traditional mainstream theater, television and movies an industry where white people are allowed to put on makeup and pretend to be people of color because too many white executives are so biased they won't even hire us to play ourselves I was angry that a quintessentially American industry was allowed to blatantly discriminate against minorities seeking employment opportunities both in front of and behind the cameras and on the stage I saw the power of popular media and culture to render us totally invisible reinforce ugly stereotypes or open hearts and minds early in my work I learned that while you could prosecute thugs for hate crimes or challenge housing, health or employment discrimination the legal system is not capable of erasing the dehumanizing pain of its victims I read that in a still fairly segregated America most Americans form their impressions about people of different races and religions from what they see in the movies and on television I firmly believe that that is one of the reasons America was ready to elect Barack Obama to the presidency because so many African Americans had been given the opportunity to play strong presidential executives on screen if Hillary Clinton is elected in November she will have benefited from the women who will portray presidents yes, even on Veep and if he who shall not be named is elected it will also show the power of media a media gone terribly wrong many people are talking about the fact that we now have more television shows featuring Asian American families and Asian American leads on television that did not happen by accident when I helped to create the Asian American media coalition and joined forces with the NAACP the National Hispanic Media Coalition and American Indians in film and television over a decade ago there were only two shows on prime time television and Asian American in even a recurring role it took persistent advocacy and work with the networks to invest in pipeline and other programs for writing producing, directing as well as showcases and trainings for actors and efforts to address unconscious bias it took uncomfortable conversations about race calling out unconscious bias and ignorance I even once had a conversation with a Hispanic writer about a slur that was on a sitcom and I was told that well in Hollywood there's a hierarchy of racial slurs some that you can say and some that you cannot it also took a partnership between civil rights groups who were not beholden to anyone in Hollywood for their next gig with leadership with expertise in the industry from East West players and visual communications who understood and could translate how it worked and it took leadership at the top of the networks willing to fully commit to invest and take the risks to make the case that diversity is in fact good business when we first began working with the networks ABC was in the basement in both ratings and diversity and now they're at the forefront and no longer in the basement I remember Alex Wallow telling me that he had assumed that everybody would be on board once they announced that diversity was a priority boy was he wrong he learned that the old boys network was not going to change without his insistence of porting of risk taking and vigilant accountability he was one of the few execs who really took to heart the invisibility on TV of Asian Americans and saw how we could enrich their storytelling the success of loss and desperate housewives brought ABC out of the basement and caught the attention of the other networks we cheered the on-screen kiss between the Korean characters and loss because how many times had we seen two Asians actually get to kiss each other and I can tell you though that Daniel Day Kim's character would have been killed off in season one had it not been for our advocacy making the case that we are tired that every time there was a killing in a sci-fi movie or on TV the first character to die was always the person of color we pushed the networks to invest in a writer's pipeline since TV is a writer's medium Mindy Kaling, Alan Yang with Masters of None are both products of the NBC Writers Initiative Shonda Rhimes is a product of the Diversity Initiative of ABC they took a risk and boy did that one pay off the effort required the civil rights groups to invest in learning how the industry worked and how money actually gets made we needed to be able to challenge the way things were being done and we needed to offer up credible alternatives and show that we had done our homework the diversity at the table of civil rights advocates Asian artists who knew both the labor system and the general ecosystem and some company insiders who were brave enough to support our cause and the fact that we are in coalition with other minority communities strengthened our leverage still it took a decade and we're still working on it we came to understand that advertising dollars drove the industry and therefore Nielsen's TV ratings were key but we discovered Nielsen was not adequately sampling the Asian American community to be able to publish what we were watching rumor had it at the time that Nielsen had only two Asian American households in all of their LA sample one of the reasons they weren't measuring Asian Americans is because quite frankly companies who were buying ad time weren't asking for it we came up with report cards to hold the networks accountable that were data based and gave the reason for the media particularly the LA Times to cover what the industry was doing every year we commissioned UCLA Asian American graduate students to do a time study they actually watched shows with a stopwatch and timed how much time regular recurring roles for Asians had compared to everyone else and of course it proved what we had been saying these were not well rounded characters they did not have families or backstories now it turns out that given the opportunity Nielsen found that Asian Americans actually prefer to watch good programs with Asian American characters who would have guessed the fresh off the boat rating chair for Asians is almost twice that of the general audience but improving minority measurements are helping to keep these shows on the air and fresh off the boat is popular not just with Asian Americans but with African Americans and Latinos and others who really can relate to the immigrant experience when Nielsen ran into controversy over changing their measurement techniques we had taken advantage of that and as a result Nielsen formed an Asian American diversity advisory group with community leaders and academics who were expert on data like the late Don Nakanishi the head of the UCLA Asian American Study Center we've worked on many aspects but one of the ones I thought was most impactful was Nielsen publishing a series of reports on Asian Americans and other minority consumers it shows that we are in fact a profitable consumer segment it shows that in fact we set the trend this effort has been slowly sinking into the business community with the Forbes magazine of all magazines recently published a detailed article on why inclusion is no longer optional for business why is this important? because ultimately to be sustainable media especially theater needs funding we need corporate America to see the growth of our population our influence as trend setters and the value of connecting their brand to our community in order to recruit the talent they need and the consumers they desire by 2018 in two years the Asian American buying power will reach one trillion dollars four times more than the coveted millennial consumer progress is even slower in the theater world I don't need to tell you that even in California majority minority states more over one in six Californians are Asian and on Broadway with very few exceptions like Hamilton last season and Phantom this season too often Asian Americans are cast in significant roles only when the story is about Asians and I mean Asians like the King and I and Miss Saigon and what is few and far between are shows that talk about Asian Americans this is why Asian American theater companies play such a critical role in our society they provide a stage where our stories can be told in our own voices they provide showcases for our talent and training and workshops to nurture newcomers they cultivate the Asian American community as theater goers and patrons they provide a platform for fresh and authentic narratives and really great entertainment they tell stories which are important for all of us to know and perhaps even more important for non Asians to know now I got involved in fighting for Asian Americans in media because I saw it as employment discrimination but in a world where politicians are seeking to copy the Chinese Exclusion Act and their call to ban Syrian refugees where like the red scare of the 1950s Chinese American scientists are presumed to be disloyal where racist killings and beatings of Asians don't even make national news and where immigrant scapegoating is being tweeted daily by a certain presidential candidate it's critical that Kata exists to support and develop strategies for Asian American theater and artists Pan Asian produced my brother Ken's play based on the book Nono Boy a couple years ago in New York and Ken did a talk back after Matt and I was some school kids he told me how moved he was when a young middle eastern girl told him that his play resonated with her because ultimately it was about identity an issue that she had been struggling with since 9-11 and talking about the new National Museum of African American History and Culture the iconic civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis said it is confronting the truth that leads to liberation from our past and that is what theater does Asian American stories well told as in Viet Cong which I saw yesterday resonate well beyond our communities they help us to know that we're not alone and they help others to know that we are all humans with our own flaws and complications and at our core sharing the same hopes and dreams I applaud the bold strategies that Asian American theaters are pursuing that the East West players work to initiate the 51% preparedness plan for American theaters particularly promising and of course the work here at OSF as with television theater will not change without persistent organizing frankly even once theaters begin to feel the economic impetus as their largely white audience continues to age there's a huge danger that they might not do it well as Frederick Douglass noted power conceits nothing without a demand it never has and it never will the entertainment industry is the most intense old boys network I've ever come across it's true of almost every human endeavor that relationships matter yes talent is always important but without relationships few will ever take a chance on someone they don't know or that their friends can't validate for television diversity we focused on building pipelines but also importantly to make sure that they had a chance to get to know the people who could actually give them the jobs we worked to ensure that internships were paid so that you didn't need wealthy and supportive parents in order to get a break into the industry now I was fortunate to see allegiance on Broadway and while the run was shorter then we all hoped it would be it exposed thousands of people to the internment who otherwise would never have known about it and yes I know you can't believe it but there are a lot of people out there who still don't know and because of the print and talk show coverage of the show the impact went far beyond the actual audience and sadly it's been one of the few shows in Broadway to portray Asians as a marathon now one benefit of the growth of Asian American talent on television is one that I didn't foresee the stars get interviewed on late night shows as well as on fashion and entertainment magazines and newspapers and thankfully many of them are not shying away from talking about the discrimination they face in the industry or telling their stories of their families and communities some like a seasoned sorry and Constance Wu are making a point to go after stereotypes and the lack of opportunity and the audience is getting schooled on what Asian America looks and sounds like Asian Americans are also becoming more actively involved with the effort to empower and lift up Asian American and Pacific Islanders like the PSAs that are now out on voter registration and voting the side benefit is that young people get Asian American role models doing something that is about as American as one can get voting these ripples all have impact while Asian American families now on television we are moving beyond the minority sidekick role of one dimensional characters no longer are we stuck seeing Asian women as helpless and needing to be saved by white heroes well we still are sometimes but at least not all the time we have Lucy Liu on Sherlock Mingnan Agents of Shield, Pianca Chopra on Quantico Mindy Kaling on the Mindy Project young Asian Americans growing up get to see people who look like them and watch stories that reflect their reality other Americans get to see Asian Americans who are funny, sexy, talented and invisible no more when I started meeting with the networks they were talking about how the shows needed to sell in middle America and given the small national population of Asian Americans and our invisibility in real life it was just not realistic to see our stories television and film was discriminatory because they merely reflected reality yet they never felt it was yet they felt it was reality to show a resort on Hawaii which only one of the nine ensemble was an Asian or Pacific Islander when I challenged the female executive she said well she gave a lot of excuses kind of rambled and then she said you know these characters have to spend a lot of time half naked and I said have you been to Hawaii? I challenge you to see anybody sexier than those people on those beaches they had no problem showing hospitals based in San Francisco with no Asian American doctors, nurses or even patients and when they had period pieces set in the 60s and 70s I would challenge them to and point out that my family existed and many others not just in Chinatown but in suburban and even Midwestern America and decades after Star Trek we would see sci-fi characters written as Asian American in the books and then somehow appear on screen as white now with the earth population more than 60% Asian a third of the earth's population is Chinese and Indian somehow these writers and directors in Hollywood think that all 4.3 billion of us get wiped off the earth growing activism of the Asian American community our increasing economic clout and the budding inclusion of Asian Americans in discussions about race our demands for inclusion are beginning to seep slowly into the mainstream media and where we've been able to build strong partnerships with allies and minority communities we are starting to be heard we need to do a better job to network with each other across the silos of our community if we're going to build a stronger movement I'm excited by the energy, the passion the commitment, the talent of the Kata Board and all of you in this room because I think who knows maybe if we start seeing Asian American presidents in place and on screen we might actually eventually elect one thank you you know after hearing what Karen said it's all about the story it's all about how we tell the story and all of us as artists tell the story well but once we leave the theater how is it that we tell our story so that's really important our confess theme is seismic ships leading change in the American theater during our time here in Oregon Leslie and I I'm Tim Dang Board Member of Kata for the past two years we have met a lot of people and established relationships with so many organizations here in Oregon how do you culturally navigate into a community and ask them for help about our confessed and we found out that there are so many people here leading change they too are change makers much like how we want to create change this is what we discovered as we culturally navigated into a new community so lesson number one cultivation and relationship building the Southern Oregon Chinese Cultural Association or SOCA SOCCA was established in 2005 by an independent 501C3 organization their mission is to sponsor educational and cultural events in Southern Oregon that showcase Chinese culture and traditions the goal is to facilitate awareness understanding and appreciation of the Chinese culture by engaging the community in dialogue and providing activities that promote understanding and respect they have a Lunar New Year Parade a 5k fun run conversations, calligraphy Kung Fu classes, movie screenings discussions on Chinese medicine Chinese history in Southern Oregon and lion dancing so Leslie and I got to know them for the past two years and we eventually asked them for their help and they supported us in terms of having this wonderful reception this past Monday at Grizzly Peak Winery so we thank them for their efforts I also had the pleasure of serving as the co-grand marshal with Bill Rauch earlier this year for the Lunar New Year Festival thank you Bill for coming with us and we have a short trailer about SOCCA we have this little history that we used to have a Chinatown here that blows my mind I never thought, I never even knew about that it's possible to have a Chinatown in a little area that has 2300 people everybody knows the west has a long history with the Chinese and so does Jacksonville people were here then they were gone why? very simple because of discrimination in the fall of 2013 as part of a sidewalk project running through the oldest part of Jacksonville we uncovered the remains of the house that burned at 3am Tuesday morning, September 11th 1888 this house is a time capsule we know that it was occupied by one or more Chinese residents of the Jacksonville Chinese quarter during a critical time in American history and there's not a lot known about what it was like to be a Chinese individual during that time period so this house provides us with a unique opportunity to shed light onto this really dynamic era in the social processes that were happening within it and that means what was daily life like for Chinese individuals living in the American west and so these remote outposts like the Gold Rush town that is now Jacksonville really provide a lot of critical information about the history of the Chinese immigrant diaspora that's relevant on the local regional and national and even international level the Chinese immigrants living in the American west are an under and often misrepresented population in the historical literature a lot of what we know about them is because of the restrictive legislation that was meant to limit their ability to own land to get married to to vote to own you know to own businesses and the danger in that is the history has been largely defined by the limitations of these people and that is certainly not a service to the experiences of these individuals that built helped build the west if we don't know what came before us if we don't understand our shared history both as immigrants to America as citizens of America as indigenous Americans as human beings then we're really losing out on a lot of opportunities to understand what it is to be human to understand how people interact with each other Jacksonville would be nothing if we didn't have the history here the historical preservation efforts the citizens here they created an economy we have a thriving tourist economy with the music festivals with now the wine country people come here they have so many things to do so many things to learn and you know as just local residents we're very happy about it it is my pleasure to award the Kata Leadership Award to the Southern Oregon Chinese Cultural Association and here to accept our board members Joey Ngan, Maywen Richards and Virginia Silvawits you know Teresa Wren you saw in the video clip was our founding person Deborah Lee as our president she's inadvertently detained so she's not able to join us with me is Maywen Richards and Virginia Silvawits who are myself members of the board and Saka actually we we received tremendous support from the community since our inception about 12 years ago and our mission is to spread our culture and and similarly now that we've met Kata we share a similar mission since Tim already promoted Saka so well I'm going to change the address a little bit and share a little bit make it a little bit more personal reflecting them back in the day and actually I graduated in theater back in 72 and I don't I don't normally tell people how old I am back in the day those of you who are Thespian scholars remember we studied Greek classics and Tiganian, Oedipus Rex and we studied contemporaries American street carving, desire of course we had Shakespeare studies but you know the closest thing we ever came that I ever knew was the Chinese was a good woman of Sichuan my Bertolt Brecht remember and so we come a long way baby and and it's kudal to OSF in recent years I've watched where Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth which Shakespeare presented as the throne of blood in Japanese it was translated as the castle of spiders and also I'm Chinese and one of my favorite tales a fairy tale is the white snake and that was very well done in OSF thank you very much so anyway on behalf of Osaka we're really proud to accept this but credit is really due to all of you thank you very much for all you do and keep the faith congratulations lesson number two you gotta have a cause and you gotta know how to articulate that cause in your story Minoru Yasui was born in Hood River, Oregon and the first Asian lawyer in the state he is most well known for his courageous stand against military orders that resulted in the forced removal and imprisonment of over 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II but his entire life was committed to the defense of human and civil rights and justice for all the Minoru Yasui tribute project is an ad hoc group of family friends, admirers, and supporters of Minoru Yasui I know him as Min Yasui as Min Yasui working towards a centennial tribute in 2016 on the anniversary of his birth Min Yasui's life was dedicated to safeguarding the rights and all peoples on her soil and advancing equal treatment of all people let's see a clip, never give up the tribute to Minoru Yasui from youth to old age Minoru Yasui spoke up and spoke out for justice for all for all his life on November 24th 2015 President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Minoru Yasui the Presidential Medal of Freedom the highest civilian honor in the nation Min never stopped believing in the promise of his country he never stopped fighting for equality and justice for all today Min's legacy has never been more important it is a call to our national conscience a reminder of our enduring obligation to be the land of the free home of the brave an America worthy of his sacrifice I thank you in this noble dream of being called for all people for your benefit for my benefit for the benefit of all future generations let's never give up thank you very much Freedom is going to be on display here on Friday at our Friday reception at the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University it is my pleasure to award the Kata Leadership Award on the tribute project Nikki Lewis is here to accept that award on behalf of Holly Yasui the family and the tribute project Nikki? I'll see you in a couple of minutes I'm a Turk and director of a play that Holly Yasui wrote more than 20 years ago and retired until a couple of years ago so in addition to the clip that you saw of the documentary film never give up that Holly is created for her dad is this play now entitled Citizen Men this play portrays the young men Yasui before he became a hero his time in the Multnomah County Jail in Portland, Oregon and the seismic shifts that made him the man that people later called for civil rights and the Martin Luther King Jr of Japanese Americans it portrays the anguished son who watched helplessly as the FBI removed his immigrant father from their family home in handcuffs and his devolution from Japanese American Citizens League leader to a pariah of his community to the hallucinating prisoner who roaches in his cell and the devastation of the Supreme Court's refusal of his appeal that was 1942 this year Citizen Men the play toured as Reader's Theater throughout New Mexico in Seattle and in Oregon this September it was presented here at OSF's Noon Speakers Series directed by the tireless and talented Leslie Ishii with a cast of Portland and OSF actors at the end of our OSF reading I pointed out that men's fellow presidential medal awardees were posthumously the son of Italian immigrants and the daughter of Afro-Caribbean immigrants Shirley Chisholm so what could be more American than that? A personal note I belong to the last generation alive to experience American incarceration during World War II I spent three and a half years of my childhood in a desert concentration camp in Minidoka, Idaho population 10,000 my immigrant father like Rob Roberta Uno's grandfather and men's father was incarcerated in Department of Justice Enemy Alien Camps in Texas and New Mexico Minusui after serving nine months solitary confinement in the county jail in Portland was sent to Minidoka for the duration of the war while dramaturging citizen men I was constantly reminded of the words what's past is pro-law these words from the tempest are carved over the entry of the National Archives in Washington DC where I went to research my father's FBI files an award like this must be shared with nameless others and that is why it is also in honor for me to accept this award on behalf of the stories and storytellers of the past 74 years and all of you seismic shifters of today and tomorrow thank you our last two awards are going to be honored together so lesson number three building community and enlist your allies whatever you do has to be for the greater good of the community not just for you not just for your group but for everybody Oregon has one of the fastest growing refugee and immigrant populations in the country forced to leave their home country for fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality political opinion or membership in a particular social group refugees and immigrants come to Portland to begin new lives Catholic Charities the social service arm of the Catholic Church partners with the most vulnerable regardless of faith to achieve lasting solutions to poverty and injustice the organization envisions a society in which all people thrive economically socially and spiritually cultivate diverse respectful and just communities and recognize the inherent dignity and sanctity of human life the Catholic Charities works in close partnership with the immigrant refugee community called ERCO ERCO serves the needs of immigrants, refugees and mainstream community members in Oregon and Southwest Washington and as a community based organization they empower children youth, family, elders from around the world to build new lives to become self sufficient by providing more than 100 culturally linguistic, specific social services their work with immigrants and refugees is the reason we are honoring them today so many of our stories are about immigrants and being forced from our homeland and displaced into another entirely different environment it's my pleasure to award the Cata Leadership Award to the immigrant refugee community organization and the Catholic Charities of Oregon and here to accept is Mari Watanabe and Koi Buu Leslie Ishi asked me to accept the word on behalf of ERCO and Catholic Charities I said sure, I always like to get awards when I didn't do anything that absorbs them but I thought the words that I should speak today should come from them so I did ask the chair of the board of ERCO to send me a few notes so these are her words ERCO and Catholic Charities have been welcoming new immigrants and refugees families from around the world for over four decades they assist individuals and families by being the first face at the airport when they arrive from their war torn countries with open arms and bottles of water through the years they've helped families who are Asian African, Slavic and now Middle Eastern they assist the families with housing, education, employment and most of all adjusting to life in the United States they are the voice and advocates of the most vulnerable individuals around the world the wonderful men and women that work at Catholic Charities and ERCO are former immigrant and refugees themselves tomorrow you will be able to meet them and some of the directors from the Africa House the Asian Family Center and Catholic Charities refugee settlement groups you can identify them because they will have a herd of youth who will be following them around and leaders this will be the first time to OSF places as Tim said through performance, songs and poetry that is how their stories are preserved this is a great honor for the two agencies to be honored and we are so grateful and I also wanted to just add last week the Department of Homeland Security our federal friends has been coming out to Portland to reach out to us Catholic Charities and ERCO have been instrumental in helping bring the community together so that these liaisons from the Department of Homeland Security can meet them and that they can get educated on who we are and what is important to us so I thank them for that as well and Koi would like to say a few words Good morning I am Koi Vu I am a coordinator with Multnomah County Library coordinating programming for 19 locations in Portland, Oregon I was asked kind of last minute earlier this morning to say something really quickly so I wrote my speech right there at my seat but thank you thank you on behalf of ERCO and Catholic Charities for this wonderful award in the past year we have been collaborating with CATA to we as the Multnomah County Library has been collaborating with CATA to bring a new public platform for artists, authors, and playwrights to come to our public spaces to perform, teach, and to exhibit their work first and foremost however we are activists and community organizers I have been working together with folks from ERCO and Catholic Charities for a long time now to help elevate our communities and amplify the voices of those who are too often forgotten or stories too often intentionally hidden and I say too long because nonprofits and social service agencies only exist because injustice and inequity still continues this past weekend we were we had the honor of hosting families from Syria and Iraqi through the help of Dr. Boudi over there I want to acknowledge that he's here he's the co-founder of Iraqi Society Oregon came here for the night last night to watch 11 Reflections of September which is the last show tonight so go watch it but we had wonderful we had wonderful shows visited wonderful shows and actually participating in a workshop from Tita and it was such a humbling and heartwarming and healing experience for all of us and we've been crying ever since so tomorrow the youth will be coming and if you have the chance to come to new place and definitely please come and introduce yourself and let them know how welcoming how welcome they are in this space as a boat refugee myself 37 years ago who lost my father a day before I was born during our escape from Vietnam the ultimate goal of our work is to be able to offer the next generation of immigrants and refugees especially our youth of color the resources and support to walk this road in peace and in hope to be present, to be activated and to act and not let our history repeat ourselves itself over and over again so thank you to Urkel and to Catholic Charities and to Iraqi Society Oregon and to all of you here for being that bridge thank you I had for being able to put her story down on the phone we have a couple of things to do and before we turn it on over I really want to thank Leslie Ishii has been thanked so many times and Leslie thank you again for being part of our our coordination of the contest but there are two other people that we also need to thank and that is the Thayer manager Sharifa Joka until you come down here Donna I'm serious Donna we're not leaving until you come down two more things to do one that will bring us together for our closing but before that today we took action to break ground to make seismic shifts and we are taking history and replacing it with the present reality here's the evidence this is from the Ashland Archive a reality after we had our flash mob the rainbow came out it's an inclusion and replacing with a new history here at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Ashland Community I'd like to turn it over now to Mina and Milani as we're just going to bring ourselves together and communion thank you so much so we really wanted to end this in circle today so if you all would come down and we could make a huge circle around the stage and maybe so so we don't have too many people on the stage maybe the board could close the circle up on stage here with us so the members just come on up with us there might need to be a second row since there's lovely so many of us so maybe those of you who are coming down from up there maybe fill in the first through third row there and as you do that we'll talk about what the circle means to us so we really wanted to create an alternate way of being a way of community coming together and acknowledge this moment with all of us in circle together and so we just wanted to grab a new way of doing things we really wanted to figure out how we could build solidarity together this has been an amazing gathering a really coalition building gathering with the West Asian pre-conference happening we're building coalitions expanding the notion of what it means to be Asian American and we're all here together today and as theater people we always feel the theater venues are our temples but so many of us do not have the privilege of being in our temple very often so as always we reach to our ancestors and the circle is sacred a lot of our work is created in a circle and so we're going to quickly do a popcorn version of what Tierra likes to call the Mahalo Circle which is in Hawaiian and usually we would go around everybody would say one word of gratitude from your experience here at Kata Confest and then we would do another actually you would also say one thing that you're grateful for and one thing you take with you so for now maybe we could just do a deep collective breath just kind of hold your neighbors hand if you want to or if you don't want to but just really feel the people in the room think about one thing that you're grateful for one thing that you'll take away and then we'll do the popcorn so just take a deep deep breath together out and I feel the need to take one more deep breath and out and go ahead one thing you're grateful for popcorn it out togetherness true longing solidarity voice reflection narration unity family connection heritage and one thing that you're taking with you from this week HOT hope more language story story story tell it again okay so we're going to add in another way that we like to close we also bring with us from Hawaii which is the word imua which means to go forward with power so we say it three times like a cheer usually we put our hands in here over big groups so let's just put our hands out first time you say imua is for yourself second time you say it for this group third time it's for the universe ready one two three imua imua thank you very much with us be sure to get all your things we'll be clearing the theater for what we call a changeover we're in the rep season here in Oregon Shakespeare thank you to Karen Narasaki Mari Watzelave of course the great Bill Rauch for being with us