DAY Project
August 19, 2005
On a sweltering July day, seven Asian American high school youth explored Detroit’s Chinatown –– or what’s left of it. Long gone are the Chinese restaurants and Asian American children playing on the street. Chung’s restaurant was the last remnant of the once-thriving Chinatown; but in 2000, it, too, closed its doors after 40 years –– joining the many gaping lots and vacant buildings in that area –– and reopened in a suburb of Detroit.
The corner of Cass Avenue and Peterboro Street now houses Birdtown Pet Shop, where owners told the high schoolers about what Chinatown used to be. Chong Lor, 14, was shocked and saddened to learn about the area’s history. “We asked them what was here before, and they said it was a Chinese restaurant,” Lor said. “All the places had changed and all the people had changed. It was very surprising. Why didn’t they keep it like that, just for the memories?”
Chong and six other youth considered issues like community and Asian American history this summer through the Detroit Asian Youth (DAY) Project, part of broader efforts to revitalize the city’s Asian American community. The DAY Project is a six-week leadership development program that motivates Asian American high school youth to develop awareness for social justice and group consciousness. The group, mostly Hmong American from northeast Detroit, met three days a week to engage in poetry workshops and theater activities. The program also included field trips. “A lot of them haven’t seen most of Detroit or anything outside of their neighborhood,” said Sabrina Van, DAY Project’s summer coordinator. The youth were certainly not familiar with Chinatown. Most residents of Detroit’s Chinatown left for suburban towns like Troy and Madison Heights in the 1960s, after construction of the Lodge Freeway sliced through the neighborhood. Detroit’s Chinatown was established in the late 1910s, and at its peak after World War II, 3,000 Chinese Americans lived there –– today, there are only a handful left.
Asian Americans make up a mere 1 percent of Detroit’s population, according to the U.S. Census. “I had no idea there was a Hmong community in Detroit,” said DAY Project Facilitator Stephanie Chang. “And I grew up in Canton, which is only an hour away. That’s really sad, but it says something about how overlooked that community is.”
One of Detroit’s most well-known native sons was Vincent Chin, the 27-year-old Chinese American engineer who was beaten to death by two disgruntled white autoworkers in 1982. It was the 20-year anniversary of his death in 2002 that ignited the idea for a program for Detroit’s Asian American youth. Organizers of the Vincent Chin remembrance events, including the Association of Chinese Americans and students from the University of Michigan, began to strategize ways to rejuvenate Chinatown, including a program for the city’s Asian American youth. “There are hardly any Asian Americans in Detroit now,” Van said. “We thought there should be a youth group for Asian Americans to come together and identify themselves as Asian Americans. They forget their importance in the city of Detroit.”
At the public high school that most of the youth attend, 7 percent of the students are Asian American; 91 percent are black American. Those numbers reflect the demographics of Detroit, where 81 percent of the population is black. Chang said that in this environment, tension is inevitable: “When it comes to being a minority in a minority-dominated city, there’s conflict.”
Lor, who, at 14, casually drops words like “oppression” and “gender roles” into conversation, said discrimination and stereotypes against Asian Americans abound, including the popular assumption that all Asians are Chinese or know martial arts. “It’s bad because I grew up in Detroit and I see things … ,” Lor said. “It’s annoying, the ignorance of my neighbors. But I’m used to it. I just gotta face it. The only thing that gets me very angry is when they mock my language.”
Yerly Lao, 18, also faced racism and used to feel intimidated by blacks. “They’d make fun of us –– ‘Aren’t you smart in math?’ and some comments worse than that,” she said. “But in my high school years, the attitude came out of me. I learned how to speak up for myself. Now I can simply ignore it.”
Chang is also concerned about a big separation between Asian Americans in the suburbs and those in Detroit. “A lot of Asian American leaders in the community won’t do things in Detroit,” she said. “They don’t associate with [Detroit residents] because of different classes and backgrounds, and seemingly different issues.” This year organizers outreached to the sizeable South Asian American community in Hamtramck, in the center of Detroit, but had little success. The program emphasizes popular education, a participatory model where each individual is both a teacher and a learner, as opposed to the traditional hierarchy of teacher over student. Interactive theater activities were based on the Theatre of the Oppressed model, which stresses a dialogue between audience and performer, instead of a unilateral monologue. For example, group members dramatized a situation involving a type of oppression, and audience members would suggest different ways to resolve the situation. “We’re trying to show them there’s not one right way to deal with situations,” said Chang. “Then, people start thinking for themselves instead of sticking to the norm.”
The group also used films like Spencer Nakasako’s Kelly Loves Tony as a tool to talk about their own experiences. Chang said many in the Detroit Asian American community marry young. “A lot of young girls will get married in high school as sophomores or juiniors,” she said. “It cuts down chances they’ll go to college.”
Organizers also wanted the youth to interact with other youth of color. They held weekly collaborations with Detroit Summer, a multicultural and intergenerational youth group started by civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs. Van hoped the DAY Project youth would make historical linkages with the Detroit Summer youth by visiting Chinatown together and learning about the decline of that ethnic enclave. “We wanted them to learn about how it’s a universal case in history that applies not just to Asian Americans but other people of color,” Van said. “Maybe they could find a common point to talk about if they learned it together.”
Meeting with Boggs was a highlight for the youth. “She has such a powerful mind,” said Lor, who calls Boggs a role model. “She told us never to give up and believe in what you believe.”
“I was shocked, knowing she was Chinese American and so active in the African American community,” Lao said. “I saw a different picture than what I see in everyday daily life. People don’t want to work for the African American community. They think something bad will happen.”
Lao was also “pretty astonished” at 90-year-old Boggs’ memory: “She still remembers things in such an orderly fashion. I’m just 18, and I don’t think I can remember as well as her.”
One of the most valuable things Lao learned was a broader definition of community. “I now understand that anything I consider to be a community can be one as long as you make it one,” she said. She also has a better understanding of oppression in society. “I didn’t fully understand it until they showed us step-by-step, the whole cycle,” Lao said. “I actually got the ‘–isms.’”
The program has stayed small the past two summers –– seven youth participated each year, a number that Van says is best for discussions and forming strong relationships between facilitators and youth. Van is hopeful for the program, but funding is always a problem. Most donations and grants come from the University of Michigan, and American Citizens for Justice gives each DAY Project youth a $250 stipend. But the program operates without an office space, and the five facilitators work on a volunteer basis, which includes carpooling the youth to and from the activities. Workshops are held in donated space from a community hospital. “It’s a very inspirational program,” Lor said hopefully. “I learned a lot about being a leader and what I want to do with my future. Spending the last six weeks with the group, I feel that I’m already beginning my future.”
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