Queen’s Asian influence explored
The Queens College Center summer institute program has initiated to provide culture teachings to its participants about the Asian-American people along with making them know more about their own identity. This week, students from all over the globe will come to the city, visit the sample area restaurants, and visit the special Asian/American hotspots as a part of the same.
This Weeklong show will have participants, from Queens College and the recent pass outs from California, Massachusetts and many other areas around the nation. The students are from Asian locations such as China, Korea, India, Filipino, Tibet, Nepal, and Pakistan and share a wide variety of ethnicity.
The director at College’s Asian-American Center, Madhulika Khandelwal said that usually anyone would go to the place to explore culture, but rather connecting with the program could be a great alternative. Inside the borough, a high US-Global interaction is seen, you can surely experience the world in the local. The people as they visit the region form diverse communities. How are the Asian-American building up themselves here?
Madhulika said that Queen College’s Center summer program started on Monday going till Saturday and she wishes to put up these questions there.
The college workshop consists of day destinations to Flushing, Jacksons, R’Hills, and Elmhurst, in which participants will tour the holy places, temples, churches, and other program homes; taste a great variety of cuisines, and attend the sessions by business-head and global leaders.
The tour will include traveling to various centers namely the South Asian Youth Action at Jackson Heights,
They will visit such organizations as the South Asian Youth Action in Jackson Heights, the Flushing Chinese Business Association, the Rajkumari Cultural Center in Richmond Hill and the MinKwon Center for Community Action in Flushing.
They will also discuss such topics as economic development in Flushing, preserving Indo-Caribbean history in Queens and language barriers for Asian Americans in health and education.
On Monday, Khandelwal kicked off the weeklong series of events with a talk on an overview of Asian-American communities in Queens.
“In Flushing, you’ve seen an economy that was dying in the 1960s and a complete turnaround because of the Asian immigration,” Khandelwal said. “The economic development is stunning to most people. In a bad economy, Flushing is prospering.”
Winnie Ng, a recent Binghamton University graduate from Brooklyn, said she wanted to be a part of the summer institute because she has long been interested in studying Asian-American cultures and is currently writing her thesis on the diffusion of traditional Chinese medicine in the United States
Khandelwal said she hopes the program allows immigrants and the children of immigrants to better understand themselves and their relationship to their parents, who are often first-generation immigrants. To people like Jamaica resident Hasina Islam, that is particularly important.
“I won’t lie and say that finding me in this sea of diversity called America has been easy, because it hasn’t,” Islam, a Bengali American, wrote in her essay to apply to the summer program. “There has always existed the temptation to be as carefree and easy going as American girls. Eating Halal or fasting during the holy month of Ramadan in a crowded lunch room while everyone is stuffing their face was tempting. Many times, there appeared to be no way out.
“I want to be able to learn more about the Asian culture .… Taking the best of both worlds I made a world for me. With the independence and education that I have in this country, I can use to empower myself and others like me. By respecting my elders, guarding my modesty, preserving my cultural values and morals, I also did not lose myself in this country like countless others and was able to preserve my identity as a Bengal American.”
