Cheerful music and a bright, colorful poster celebrated Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Heritage month during a Thursday online open mic.
The open mic, which occurs monthly, was hosted by San Jose State’s MOSAIC Cross Cultural Center on Zoom.
Program coordinator Sharon Singh said SJSU MOSAIC have hosted open mics to give a platform to students who are visual
artists and poets.
“With everything going on in the world, we really wanted to have student artists’ voices and our
feature artists voices to represent and speak on what’s going on,” Singh said in a Zoom interview.
SJSU MOSAIC’s open mics have been a tradition for about 10 to 15 years and this month’s open mic was in honor of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Heritage month, Singh said.
Kenny Jackson, SJSU MOSAIC’s cultural programmer, and Parul Puri, task force student coordinator, began by introducing themselves and encouraging “free speech, not hate speech.”
Visual artist and nutritional science junior, Nina Chuang said she creates her artwork through her perspective as an Asian American woman.
As a Taiwanese-Malaysian American, Chuang said she began researching Asian American activism in history books during high school and was inspired to incorporate what she learned into her work to inform others.
“I realized that Asian American women have grown up in a society where they are told to be ashamed of their culture, to be ashamed to be a woman,” Chuang said in a phone interview. “That’s what kind of inspired me with some of my pieces, that Asian women embody fierceness that is not really acknowledged within
our communities.”
She also said she’s never showcased her work in an open mic before and felt unfamiliar with the atmosphere. However, she was inspired by the event’s featured artist, William Nu’utupu Giles.
Giles is a Samoan poet and arts educator from Honolulu, Hawaii, who has performed in places including the San Francisco Opera House, the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. and Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre, according to SJSU MOSAIC’s Instagram. Their work has also been featured on HBO’s documentary “Russell Simmons Presents: Brave New Voices,” The National Parks Service, the YouTube channel Button Poetry and NBC News.
Giles’ heartfelt performance began with “Synonyms for Mistake,” a poem about their birth. They performed another poem called “Oral Traditions” about the Pacific Islander storytelling tradition and how their culture was colonized in Hawaii.
Giles made a strong connection to their culture and a painful description of how language can be lost through time.
“I think that in our country, especially through the [U.S.] education system, we’re taught to really be silent, [to] not speak our truth and become workers for capitalism,” Giles said. “But I think poetry and storytelling is one of the most powerful things people can do on an individual level.”
Singh said SJSU MOSAIC chose Giles as its featured artist because it wanted to bring distinct voices onto the platform.
“Pacific Islanders often don’t get heard,” Singh said. “[They are] tokenized or they’re not really considered and there’s a long history of that in the U.S.”
With recent violence targeting the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American community in the U.S., the art and poetry in the open mic was just some of the ways Asian American students and SJSU faculty have come together to show support and embrace each other.
