David Kyuman Kim on Tavis Smiley Show

Dr. David Kyuman Kim, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Connecticut College, Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, and author of Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2007), will appear on the PBS Tavis Smiley show on Thursday, December 20 to discuss his recent works.

Dr. Kim is a member of our annual APARRI conference. This year's conference will take place August 7-9, 2008 at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.

Burma or Myanmar?

This post has been moved to:

http://www.panainstitute.org/joe-cheah-burma-myanmar

Trangdai Tranguyen on the fires in southern California

Firing up the Voices
by Trangdai Tranguyen

The air smells of death. The silence tastes morbid. The sky stops breathing. The ocean becomes distant.

On the balcony strewn with crunchy green leaves and inundated with suffocating ash, the plants and flowers let their leaves off, begging for water respite and CPR.

My nose is bleeding. The same way my heart bled on the empty endlessness of New Orleans freeways, in the boundless blankness of Biloxi neighborhoods, at the fathomless frustration in which disadvantaged Louisiana residents swayed. Months after the hurricanes, green trees pushed elbows with half-witted houses and dangling street lights, as if mocking, as if inviting, as if challenging.

Renters returned home – for they had no where else to go, or could not come to part with that piece of their heart. But there was another piece that they needed. A piece of paper.

A piece of paper is everything. Without it, they no longer exist. It is their life – which they no longer have. Elderly men displaced by wars, then displaced by flood, asked for assistance. They stood in line day in day out, only to be sent home empty handed from the relief stations overflowing with donated goods. Immigrant fishermen came for emergency stipends. They were told that their 'number' could not be located. A place of destruction: that was all they had. Nothing more.

Not many others came back. Yet those who took the risk to return home found themselves deprived of the aids that were reserved for the 'legitimate' who had safely relocated else where in their relatives' homes. Safely. Long ago.

Water. Fire. Different? Maybe so from aerial views. On the ground, the pattern repeats. On the ground, real things happen. It is the human life that is at risk, the marginal voices that resonate into thin air, the inequitable distribution of aids that persist, the refusal to acknowledge that certain lives have value, the violence of perpetuating discrimination.

These lives are not irrelevant. They get fish from the sea to the dock. They get food on the table. They clean the sheets. They water the plants. They build the freeways. They drive the trucks. They are the hands that craft tomorrow and the feet that move today in the most organic way.

Though they are treated as replaceable goods, they are not disposable. They are humans.

They are life.

Trangdai Tranguyen is a member of PANA's Civil Liberty and Faith Think Tank.

Introducing Jessica Oya

Jessica Oya joined the PANA staff in fall of 2007. Welcome, Jessica!

Jessica says...

As a first-year MA student at PSR/GTU, I have found PANA's presence on PSR's campus to be incredibly refreshing. After having spent my undergraduate years at Scripps College, a member of the Claremont Colleges where we lacked any type of five-college resource center, coming to a school that provides support to their API students and members of the greater Berkeley/San Francisco area is a welcome change. In addition to my time at Scripps, I have also spent the last two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Kingdom of Swaziland, doing community HIV/AIDS education in a rural village. Living out in the rural area was a challenging experience, not because of the lack of amenities such as insulated houses, running water and electricity, but because of the feeling of detachment and lack of connection to an API community. Having had the opportunity to spend time with the PANA staff and the participants at the Capturing the Heart conference a few weekends ago, I am beginning to gain a sense of the API community within the Bay Area. Needless to say, it’s great to be in an environment where I feel supported and welcome!

I came to GTU/PSR with an interest in the dialogues surrounding science and religion (I did a double major in biology and religious studies as an undergraduate), about the effects colonization and transnational corporations have had on the developing world, bioethics, and Asian American theology. In my first semester at GTU/PSR I have been given the opportunity to touch on all of these issues and have begun to experiment with ideas and combine them into a theology that is uniquely my own. I am eagerly looking forward to the rest of my time here as I begin to get to know people both within the API community and within the GTU community.

Read a paper on Asian American Christian Theology by Jessica Oya.