This past weekend I attended the New York City Asian American Student Conference at NYU. I had to go since it was taking place at my absolute dream school and I had such a good time at the previous Asian American conference I went to and wanted to learn more and keep educating myself.

My first conference of the day took place in a large beautiful lecture hall with red curtains poised to cover the two layers of whiteboards. It was called "Discovering Our Voices: Storytelling, Literature, and Writing" featuring a panel of authors, most of whom have also been editors. As an aspiring editor and author myself, I thought listening to their experiences would help me for my future. They talked about how they were accused by people "more Asian" than they were of their stories not being "authentic" enough because they themselves didn't go through the experiences they were writing about. For the most part, there was a running thread that their parents did not understand exactly what their careers were and why they would choose it instead of something "stable" with "guaranteed pay," which I can relate to a lot.

I decided to go to a mixed-race caucus since I decided not to go to one during my last conference and was not really that surprised to see that there was about four other people in the room. From what I saw in the opening ceremony, most students at the conference were full rather than mixed, and for the most part of East Asian descent. And besides maybe other mixed race people decided to check out another conference, as I had done during my last one.

One of the people there said something that bothered me. She said she felt like a "watered down" version of each of the races that she was. And the person running the caucus (no offense to her) kinda made it seem like being mixed race was being "less than" in each culture that you're part of because you're not fully one of them and acted like that was a universal feeling and experience when for me that is not the case at all.

From what I've observed, at least in my culture, is that mixed raced Asians are treated better than the ones who aren't. They get exposure in the media. They get held up as "the standard." When Asians marry white people, their whole family rejoices because "their babies will be beautiful." As if full-Asian babies aren't beautiful, which is absolutely not true.

My last workshop of the day was led by this woman named Patti, who is in the process of designing an adventure video game called "The Girl Who Sees" centered around a Filipina village girl during World War 2 going on a quest, incorporating culture and language learning in the game. She explained that this was different from other video games of its kind because it focused on the village peoples' narrative, rather than those of the soldiers that fought in the war. The main character would also have to interact with the people, as opposed to other games where they just have the setting as a background and we don't learn anything about it or the people living there.