The Taiwanese American Students Association (TASA) hosted their annual night market last Saturday. The event, which strived to mimic the night market of Taiwan’s Jiufen area, offered food, games and performances for students who attended.
TASA donated the revenue from ticket sales to the Lhasa Charity Foundation, which provides healthcare for people in Taiwan.
“We estimate about 345 people... attended, including all of our performers, and we’ve raised about $1000,” TASA Co-President Evelyn Ho wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
This year, the Inter-Asian Council (IAC) hosted a booth dedicated to breaking Asian stereotypes. Participants filled in the sentence “I’m Asian and I’m not...” or “I’m Asian and I’m...” on a whiteboard and were asked to have their photos taken with their message. The purpose of this activity was to break Asian stereotypes.
IAC Freshman Liaison Timothy Lee helped run the booth. He explained how the activity worked to raise awareness for Asian culture and societal issues faced by Asian communities. He noted Asian under-representation in the film industry, citing the recent casting of Scarlett Johansson as an Asian woman in a remake of the Japanese film Ghost in the Shell.
“I think TASA Night Market is a great event where people are drawn in initially because of the food and performances, but we’re also trying to raise awareness about Asian culture and issues,” Lee said. “Right now there is something called Ghost in the Shell. It’s originally a Japanese cartoon and they’re doing a live action [movie] for it, yet they’re using a white actress, Scarlett Johansson. So that’s raising a lot of issues. We saw TASA night market as a way to add an educational aspect and raise awareness for the social stereotypes that we fall into, or that we are trying to break.”
IAC Director of Education and Outreach Jennifer Lee expanded on the complex issue of identity for Asians and Asian-Americans as well as the role that IAC plays to bridge that discrepancy at Hopkins through events such as the TASA Night Market.
“I think Asians and Asian-Americans often sit on a tenuous line between privilege and disadvantage — we simultaneously face marginalization and exceptionalism — we’re homogenized as a ‘model minority,’ and too often racism against Asians is dismissed or excused,” Lee wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “Asians are too often seen as a monolith — which not only contributes to the model minority myth, but also feeds into the general societal whitewashing of Asians. We see this in the perpetual casting of white actors/actresses in Asian roles. So, a big part of our mission this year at IAC was to raise awareness of the diversity that exists within the AAPI [Asian-American and Pacific Islander] community at Hopkins and nationwide.”
The event featured a wide variety of student groups, including the Chinese Student Association, the Japanese American Student Association and the Asian Student Alliance, a student organization from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
“Taiwanese night market is a popular kind of event in Taiwan. At night you go out: There’s a bunch of stalls, there’s food, there’s games... that we have set up. And performances are just something that we bring in to help make it more lively,” TASA Programming Chair Allan Wang said.
The event also featured a number of performances by student groups, including the hip-hop dance group SLAM, Chinese a cappella group Music Dynasty, and the Yong Han Lion Dance Troupe.
Marie Hsiao, a self-producing experimental folk artist of Taiwanese-American descent, was the headliner for the event. Known by the stage name Mree, the 22-year-old artist has a popular Youtube channel called MreeMusic where she posts original songs and covers.
Freshman Hannah Jeon praised the event overall.
“I think it was an awesome event,” Jeon said. “I didn’t really know much about Taiwanese culture before this, but after I’ve come here I got to see a little bit of it.”
Freshman Sophia Mitsotaki enjoyed the festival as well, drawing on her background as an international student.
“I think it’s one of the best events I’ve ever been to,” Mitsotaki said. “I feel like it’s a great way to show other people your culture and just get people a lot of people together in one event. I feel like those international events are definitely important because they strengthen the international community a lot.”
Sherry Kim contributed reporting.
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