<Begin Segment 7>

RB: So when did, where and when did you go to college and what made you choose that location?

PU: Well, I graduated high school in 1973 and I went to Oberlin College right after I graduated. It's in northeastern Ohio, and I kind of had been looking at schools that were like that when I was in high school, just kind of small, private liberal arts. Well, not necessarily small-small, because Oberlin is not real small. And I don't know, like that's the one, the places that I got in appealed to me the most. And it's kind of fortuitous, I think, that I went there because I think it had a big impact on how things evolved afterwards.

RB: Would you say that you were politicized in college, or were you already sort of moving in a direction towards advocacy?

PU: I was definitely politicized in college. It was almost entirely because of getting involved with other Asian American students.

RB: What were some of the organizations or causes that you were involved with in college?

PU: So, when I first arrived there, I immediately was, people reached out from the Asian American Alliance, which was a student organization on campus, to get involved with them, which I did right off the bat. And made friends there and social activities and stuff like that. And I think by my second year, it was partly because of the advocacy done by the Asian American Alliance that this new dormitory was created that was called the Third World dorm, and so I was in the first group of students to live there. So it was all minority students in the dorm, and we had programs there and activities. They moved it to another building when I was a junior. And I think when I was, it was probably when I was a sophomore, I was elected to the Student Senate. And I think when I was a junior, I was of the people that helped form this new student organization called the Progressive Student Union, but got involved in various issues, a lot of campusey kind of issues, like with budget cuts, and things like that. And through the Alliance, we would always bring like, outside speakers in, including, we had someone from Yellow Seeds come out and give a presentation about what they were doing in Philadelphia.

And Oberlin has this thing called a winter term where there's a, like a month-long period, basically, between the semesters when you had to do some kind of project or study that was educational, but it was pretty freeform. And I remember friends would do some of these things that were kind of like they would go someplace and it would be something where they were working on a project that was really grounded in some aspect of the community. Like where they were coming to New York to hang out with people at the basement workshop, or what have you, that there were a lot of connections, you know, from outside organizations onto campus and so on. And there was definitely, at that point, a number of people that were very involved in fairly radical Asian centered organizations and study groups, and so on, so I was involved in some of that. And I remember going to some meetings with other college students that were very, you know, like totally political, like study group kind of weekend meetings, and organizing some things like that with other Midwest college students. So that was a big thing, too.

RB: So a couple questions about that time period. First off, the Third World dorm, I'm guessing is sort of referential to the Third World Liberation Front and the sort of Ethnic Studies movements that were happening? Was ethnic studies part of what your organizing was related to in your college years?

PU:  I don't think there was too much of that. I mean, we did have... I remember taking a course, kind of an Asian American Studies course, but it wasn't, it wasn't in the actual kind of traditional academic curriculum. They had this program called the Experimental College where anybody could offer coursework, and it could be for credit. But sometimes it was taught by students, or it could be people who are not faculty members. And so we had, there's this position for what's called an Asian American counselor coordinator on campus, and he put together Asian American Studies curriculum that was offered to the experimental college, and I remember signing up for that and doing all kinds of reading for that. But the demographic was very different than from what it is now, in terms of the size and the diversity of the student population. So when I was in college, it was probably like something like ninety percent of the students were either Chinese or Japanese American, and there were a handful of Koreans, one Vietnamese student, and maybe another handful of South Asian students. So it was very, very different. And it might have been like, there were a hundred Asian American students on campus, I don't know, twenty-five hundred students or something. So now it's dramatically different in terms of the relative size of the student population and the diversity of how it's made up. So it was very different. And so I think that would have also been a factor in thinking about, we wouldn't be thinking about having a department or having a bunch of faculty or something. Some of the people would be in other fields, whether it was more focused on Asia itself, Asian art or Asian history, that kind of thing, Asian Americans.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.