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RB: One question I wanted to circle back on, can you tell us a little bit about how Asian Americans United came about and what was your role as a co-founder?

PU: So that would have been in the early '80s, and so I think a couple of us felt this need to, you know, have an organization, a local organization here that was a little bit more politically conscious and more community-oriented than the other organizations that existed here that related to community, and so Mary and I and Debbie Wei and Ming, her husband, I think she went, Fernando Chang Wei and maybe a couple other people that are not, I can't recall at this point who actually initially said, "Let's talk about this," but I do remember that where we met was at the Community Legal Services offices that I worked at. I remember going to meetings in our conference room at 1312 Locust Street. And so it was a small group of us, and we sat around and tried to figure how what we wanted to do and started working on it. And so, as I said, I think that would have been like '84 or '85 that we were having those initial meetings. And so I participated in that, and can't really take any credit for anything that happened after those initial meetings, because, again, the air got sucked out of me by law school, which was starting at the same time. So I stepped back from that, but Mary and Debbie continued to push that forward. And I just remember having some incidental contacts with AAU in the very early years when they would have summer programs. They were kind of youth-oriented, because I remember some of the programs were housed in our neighborhood in West Philadelphia, where you'd have high school kids that were running programs for little Asian kids. And with a focus probably on the refugee families. So things like that were, things were kind of getting off the ground and people were starting activities and trying to figure out principles that AAU would operate under. And it was all very informal and unpaid work at that point. But then at some point there was a transition made where people were getting grants and hiring staff and so on, and things kind of went on from there.

RB: Thanks for that.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.