“Coming to college, I felt this impulse to pursue this long journey or whatever into finding my identity,” said Joseph Guanlao, a Filipino American student active in Filipino American events on campus.

“[There is this] comfort in hanging out with people who look like me, who eat the way I do,” he said.

Issues like identity, culture, and what it takes to build a coalition between different Asian student groups were discussed in one of a series of student-mediated dialogues put on through the Philippine American Dialogue and Discourse (PADD) and the Thai Student Association (TSA) student groups.

Laurie Sears, a professor at the UW Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and director of the Southeast Asia Center, received a grant that allowed her and other UW faculty members to explore and develop new modes of talking about identity and diversity.

“The Southeast Asia Center really focuses on Southeast Asia. Our grant doesn't let us focus on Southeast Asian Americans, so we felt a lack there; we felt we needed to do something,” she said.

“This was a way we felt we could begin to talk to Southeast Asian Americans students and their experience with being Southeast Asian American students.”

Students opened up and shared these experiences, whether it was growing up with parents who only spoke Vietnamese to them, attending a British International School in Thailand as half-Thai and half-White, or going to high school in Central Washington with predominantly white friends.

“I kind of feel like I don't have an identity and I'm trying to find something to align to,” said Hazel Lozano, a PADD member. “No matter what I study, there's always this issue of what my home is, whatever that means, or what my motherland is, whatever that means.”

The constant search for an established identity was a theme for most students, but even more pronounced was how that search became more pressing once they entered college or moved to America for the first time.

“In Thailand, I didn't have that pressure,” said TSA Vice President Ashley Muller, one of the organizers for the discourse. “Only in America did the need to relate to other people in a group become predominant,” she said.

The other student organizer, Carmel Laurino of PADD agreed. It was only when she started attending college that she became vastly involved with Filipino-American issues.

“Identity is a question that will always be in the back of my mind, and I will never get an answer to it,” Laurino said. Rather, she argued, the question becomes how to look “beyond identity.”

Laurino's answer was to build coalitions between different Asian student groups. “If you don't try to move forward you will always be stagnant trying to find out who you are,” she said.

Muller added that the need for coalitions between these groups is to form a cohesive whole, having a “larger impact” on UW affairs, and supporting one another's cultural festivals.

“The benefit would be empowerment,” she said. “We can pull a greater weight in the University, we can maybe have an office… most of our [smaller] groups don't have one.”

There are five existing, and soon to be six, different Filipino student organizations at the UW campus. Professor Sears marveled at how “receptive” Filipino students are in becoming involved with the faculty and participating in discourses and events such as this one.

“I think it's because we're the most confused,” Laurino said.

Laurino and Komgrit Treetibut, a TSA and Japanese Student Association member, both argued for the need to break down barriers within student groups.

“Why haven't we had this dialogue before between Vietnamese, Filipino, and other student coalitions?” Laurino asked.

“There is this lack of communication, boundaries we don't cross,” Treetibut said, referencing racial hierarchies that still exist today in Asia. “We need to open up more.”

Professors Darryl and Kathleen Johnson, UW Jackson School faculty members leading a study abroad program to Northern Thailand this summer, offered their advice.

“You build an identity as a third culture, a moving nomad culture, instead of looking for an identity, asking 'Am I Filipino, am I Chinese?' There are real advantages and a richness to you,” said Kathleen Johnson.

“What are your concerns? What is the agenda in your coalition? Coalition to do what? What is your common purpose, is there even a common purpose, is studying the common purpose?” Darryl Johnson asked.

Some students wondered if coalition building would do any good.

Most student clubs have their own agendas and goals, Guanlao said, and Victor Nguyen from the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) agreed, as the question again circled around identity.

“How can we be part of a coalition if in VSA we can't pin down [our own] Vietnamese identity?” he asked.

Why does the question of identity linger in the minds of Asian American youth? Lozano offered one possible reason.

“We all come back to the question of identity because we all want it. [The people who question identity] are the people who have been marginalized politically, we're the people who don't have that connection [to the mainstream]… that's what it all comes down to,” Lozano said.

“It's about filling a void,” Guanlao said.