Community Conversations: Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month

Program Type:

Celebrate, Civics & Community, Discuss, Listen

Age Group:

Teen, Adults, Seniors
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Event Details

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage month. Traverse Area District Library (TADL) invites you, our community, to help recognize the contributions, achievements, and identities of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) that have helped shape America’s development into a richly multicultural society.

Let's get together to enjoy and celebrate regional AAPI food vendors along with an engaging conversation on identity, culture, and experiences in Traverse City!

Join us this evening for:

  • Light refreshments beginning at 5:30pm
  • Vincent Who? documentary starts at 6:00pm
  • Community discussion after the film!

In 1982, at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments arising from massive layoffs in the auto industry, a Chinese-American named Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit by two white autoworkers. Chin's killers, however, got off with a $3,000 fine and 3 years probation, but no jail time. Outraged by this injustice, Asian Americans around the country united for the first time across ethnic and socioeconomic lines to form a pan-Asian identity and civil rights movement. Ultimately, Vincent Who? asks how far Asian Americans have come since the case and how far they have yet to go. For in spite of Vincent Chin's monumental significance in both the Asian American experience and the civil rights history of America, the vast majority of people today (including most Asian Americans) have little or no knowledge of him.

Thanks to support from Northern Michigan E3 and the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation, light refreshments from local Asian American food vendors will be served.