Brookline Asian American Family Network
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  • Previous BAAFN Events
    • 2017 >
      • 2017 Lunar New Year Event
      • AAPI May 24th, 2017 event
    • 2016 >
      • February 2016 - Lunar New Year Event
      • December 2016-Let's Talk Event
    • 2015 >
      • February 2015 - Pan Asian Lunar New Year Event
      • May 2015 - Author of "Eurasian"
      • September 20th, 2015 - Brookline Day
      • October 24th, 2015 - BAAFN Open House with Assoc.Dean Brian Poon
    • 2014 >
      • February 2014 - Pan Asian Lunar Event
      • May 2014 - A Day In the Life of Asian Pacific America, Workshop
      • AAPI Brookline Library Display
      • October 2014 - BAAFN Open House
    • 2013 >
      • February 2013 - BAAFN Lunar New Year
      • May 2013 - Asian Americans Speak, Adoptee & Multiracial students, panel discussion
      • July 2013 - BAAFN Potluck Picnic at Larz Anderson Park
      • September 2013 - Brookline Teen Center and Brookline Day
    • 2012 >
      • October 14th, 2012 - BAAFN Open House
    • 2011
    • 2010
    • 2009
  • Letter to School Committee
  • Letter to Select Board
  • Pictures from Vigil
  • Vigil Introduction - Ashley Eng, BHS '19
  • Vigil Statement - Yuki Hoshi, BHS '22
  • GASP statement March 2021
  • Resources of Interest
    • Town of Brookline
    • U.S. Census Report 2010 (issued March 2012)
    • Understanding Brookline
    • Bibliography for Adoptees and Multiracial
    • Brookline Reads Books
  • Rachel Lee - 2018 BAAFN Award -
  • Jocelyn Zhou - 2018 Creativity Award
  • Yiming Fu - 2018 Creativity Award
  • Lana Chang - 2018 Content Award
  • Maiya Whalen - 2019 BAAFN Award -
  • Iris Yang - 2019 Content Award
  • Nina Bingham - 2019 Creativity Award
  • Elena Su - 2020 BAAFN Award -
  • Sellina Yoo - 2020 Creativity Award
  • Adrian Seeger - 2020 Content Award
  • Rani Balakrishna - 2020 New Voice Award
  • Jacqueline Gu - 2021 BAAFN Award
  • Tina Li - 2021 Activist Award
  • Lilia Burtonpatel - 2021 Creativity Award
  • Claire Choi - 2021 Content Award
  • Audrey Seeger - 2021 Content Award
  • Joon Lee - Keynote address 5/5/21
  • Driscoll School - 2021 AAPI Project
  • Pierce School - 2021 AAPI Project
  • Eun-Jae M. Norris - 2022 BAAFN Award
  • Emerson Lin - 2022 BAAFN Award
  • Ellie Hyde - 2022 Content Award
  • Kayla Chen - 2022 Creativity Award
  • 2022 Essay Contest Rules

2022 BAAFN Content Award


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Eun-Jae M.Norris - click on picture to access recording of event reading
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 The Plight of the Pica Serica
by Eun-Jae M. Norris

              In Korea, when the persimmon harvest is finished, it is custom to leave a few at the top of each tree for the magpies. This is known as ggachi-bap, or the ‘magpie meal’. Korean magpies symbolize sturdy spirit and prosperity, white-striped givers of good fortune. In America, however, they are seen as the opposite: conniving, greedy inconveniences who thieve what glitters and leave the rest. 

              To be Asian-American is to feel like a magpie in the latter sense, a thief hungry to experience your culture through a hoard of its shiniest, sweetest elements and nothing more; it is the shock of guilt when persimmon nectar hits your tongue, as if you are doing something inherently wrong by reaching for a taste of your heritage. Picking at sickly-sweet leftovers, stuck a treetop away from the people on the ground, you are left with nothing but the gnawing fear that you are no better than a tourist. 

             The ache of being an outsider is not exclusive to the Asian aspect of being Asian-American. America often rejects us as well, forcing us into the cliche of the perpetual foreigner, as if we have any less of a right to the country we fought to make our home. To be Asian-American is to know you will be seen as exotic, ‘other’, no matter what you do. It is to know any piece of your culture you display can be turned against you. If it is not accepted, it will be spit in your face but perhaps worse, if it is deemed palatable, it will be swallowed and appropriated, reduced to nothing but another prop in the glimmering parody trying to replace your reflection. The only option that will not get you hurt is to reject your culture entirely, to try to eradicate your ‘otherness’ and become quietly ‘American’. Many of our families were forced to choose that option; many of us are forced to do the same today. In the ripples of that choice, a gap forms between Asian-Americans and Asian culture, widening with the ocean that separates our continents. 
​

            When we as Asian-Americans second-guess our right to our own identities, agonize over whether or not what we present of ourselves is consumable, we are entering a conflict skewed against us from the start. If we present sweetness, we fear being devoured; if we present astringency, we fear being thrown out and left to rot. Made to constantly criticize our own appearance, to be Asian-American becomes bitterness, impostor syndrome, guilt- a hesitance between our heritage and our outstretched hands, scared our fingerprints will stand out orange and saccharine with the phantom residue of our greed. The grand American truth of it is that we will always feel as though we are stealing from our own culture, if the only definition of the magpie we recognize is the American thief.
           
            The grand Asian-American truth of it is that we cannot steal what has been ours from the beginning. All of what it means to be us - the sweet, the bitter, and everything in between - was never anyone else’s to claim. We have always had the right to celebrate our own culture without caveat, to rejoice and create and, yes, even make mistakes without the spectre of self-doubt looming over our shoulder. Loving who we are and where we come from, taking pride in just one facet of our heritage on our own terms, is an act of rebellion against the systems and people that would see us quietly disappear. To be Asian-American often means to live in distance: distanced from your ancestry, from your culture, from yourself. But even as that feeling lingers, being Asian-American means so much more than that. Being Asian-American means a range of experiences as vast as either continent. It can mean loss and struggle, but it can also mean joy, community, and connection. It can mean creating a kinder definition than the misinterpretation banded around our ankles. It can mean feasting on persimmons that were always meant for us, the space between the treetops and the ground noted and set aside. One day, we will know we were never thieves for doing so. 


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