Mixed Reactions to Wartime Slavery Settlement (in National News) Candlelight Vigil for Chanti Pratipatti (in Bay Area News) Sina.Com Stretches Across Chinese Communities (in Business) Festival of American Playwrights of Color (in A&E) Emil Amok: King Court (in Opinion)

No Small Fête

Three API leaders with disabilities honored for empowering others

Top to Bottom: James Sato, a writer with schizophrenia; Sharon Lynn Nguyen, who suffers from cerebral palsy; and Olegario D. Cantos, an attorney who is blind. Photos courtesy of Tom Olin.

By Joseph Hong

In Iowa James Sato had just graduated from college and began to work in his first full time job. Soon after, he started to overhear his coworkers gossiping about him. He wondered, “What’s going on here…I’m not that interesting.” The whispers at work would focus on his religion (Buddhist and Catholic) and ethnic background (half Japanese and half Irish). It got worse. “I heard voices cursing me out, raining expletives…and I would hear those voices say that over and over again.”

Those voices he heard were not originating from his coworkers but from his own mind. Sato was beginning to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. With treatment and medication, Sato, now 31, has the disease under control.

Recently, he wrote and published a memoir of his experiences entitled The Dream Eater. “I started the memoir because I didn’t see very many positive portrayals of schizophrenia in the media. Usually you see them as killers or somebody to be feared — not as somebody that has as much a physical illness as a mental illness because it is a disorder of the brain…I wanted to write a positive portrayal of schizophrenia,” Sato said.

Sato is one of 11 people who won the Washington D.C.-based American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) Leadership Award this year, with a cash prize of $10,000, for his memoir on schizophrenia. He is one of three Asian Americans to receive the honor.

“The whole area of mental illness and psychiatric disabilities is one area that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of educating the public. And clearly that is something [Sato} is willing to do by sharing his personal story in order to get the story out and to decrease the stigma of that disability,” according to Tracy Murray, an AAPD application reviewer.

The AAPD is a national organization that promotes political and economic empowerment to the more than 56 million citizens with disabilities in the United States. The annual award in its second year, honors 11 to 12 people each year and is at the forefront of bringing a positive impact to people with disabilities.

Sharon Lynn Nguyen, 24, also received an AAPD leadership award this year. Stricken with cerebral palsy, Nguyen developed a support group for physically challenged Vietnamese American youths and young adults. She was recently selected to be on the Presidential National Youth Leadership Conference for People with Disabilities. Nguyen believes key barriers that disabled people have are “cultural issues of capabilities and living a ‘normal’ life.”

Nguyen said the AAPD award, “…gives me strength and encouragement and it gives me a new bond with the disability movement, especially within our Asian culture … My work is going to be geared toward local Vietnamese and also those back in Vietnam.”

Olegario “Ollie” D. Cantos VII, 30, a Filipino American who is blind, works as an attorney at the Western Law Center for Disability Rights in Los Angeles. Joining Sato and Nguyen, Cantos was also awarded an AAPD Leadership Award.

With the $10,000 prize “Ollie” is planning to create an outreach internship program for people with disabilities. He also plans to use part of the cash prize as seed money for other projects, such as a disability rights clearinghouse and an online interactive disability rights training Web page.

Asked if he had any suggestions for anyone applying for the award next year Cantos said, “The big suggestion is really to think creatively on how to do what has never been done before. How can you bring together people from the public and private sector to get things done in a way that was never before even thought possible? When you have that kind of thinking and when you have a firm set plan of what you want to do and how to do it, it really, really, helps.”