Commerce 2024 Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Event

to be here so I hope uh that he can find adequate WiFi and join the meeting we are recording this meeting today for the sake of colleagues who are on vacation uh last week and this week so we hope that they would not miss the treat we have prepared for you today my name is Ann Ngo I am a senior International Trade specialist with the International Trade Administration I am also the president of the a the Department of Commerce Asian-American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group and welcome welcome um to expedite matters I will ask our facilitator from the Office of Civil Rights Miss Felicia Harris hi Felicia if you would please post in the chat The Rules of Engagement so our audience would know that number one uh you are welcome to to put questions into the chat for the panelist and if you wish a particular panelist to answer please indicate their name in a bracket if not uh one of the moderators will read your question and any panelist can choose to answer I am pausing so our interpreter will have a chance to catch up this month uh this year the Heritage Month theme is "Bridging Histories and Leaving a Lasting Legacies so we have invited an artist and two authors who have expressed themselves through different media of art and writing when you're ready Felicia please post the bios of the authors in the chat for our audience to read but I will invite our panelist to introduce themselves very briefly uh and before I do that I want to thank Mr Francisco Roman who's the American Sign Language interpreter thank you very much for being here and facilitating our conversation I also will uh invite after the panelists introduce themselves to ask the moderators Miss Sharon Williams and Miss May Chung to introduce themselves so first panelist Miss Yi Wang please introduce yourself please introduce yourself hello my name is Yi Wang my last name y a n g and it's pronounced e e Wang okay um wait a minute I'm having a problem because she's very pixelated when you made her larger okay try it again I'm sorry hello my name is Yiquiao Wang and I use Yi Wang y i w a n g it's pronounced E Wang I am an Asian deaf artist I was born in China in Beijing I went to the University of China then I came to America and I learned English and ASL at Gallaudet University I studied media arts and visual Arts at Gallaudet University I have an MFA degree from the University of Shanghai and now I am an industrial artist I have five murals in America four of them are in the DC area one of them is outside Minnesota in Minneapolis Minnesota that's all I have for now all right Miss uh Sarah Soon-Ling Blackburn please introduce yourself hello everyone so lovely to be here with all of you uh my name is Dr Sarah Soon-Ling Blackburn I'm an author an educator a speaker um I do a lot of work mostly around belonging and inclusion so I work with companies organizations schools on um culture and the idea that we all are more successful happier do better when we feel like we belong when we feel um like the work we do is relevant to our lives all of that kind of thing I started my career as a classroom teacher and um since working with adults have really found how much we as adults need and crave the same thing that young people do and as a writer part of what I try to do is to bring the storytelling component the history the the knowledge that we don't always have particularly as Asian-American Native Hawaiian and or Pacific Islander people um you know because of the invisibility that so often exists to fill in those pieces to again get to that place of belong and I'm grateful to be here with all of you today yes for those of you who may wonder there is a lag time so that uh Cisco would have a chance to hear or see what is being said think about it then translate it for the other side and we are learning because we have among our speakers one who uses Sign Language American Sign Language how how the challenges that they face that most of us don't think about so today is a learning experience for all of us and uh at some point in time we're going to have to let Cisco rest so that's another reason why there's a h a lot of pauses and silence in between our speakers I don't see uh our third panelist yet so hopefully he will join us soon but I would like to introduce our two moderators to please introduce themselves Miss May Cheng and Miss Sharon Williams may please proceed good afternoon everyone my name is May Cheng and I will be the moderator uh to capture questions in the chat and um my role here uh here is the moderator and my uh regular day job position uh is uh the Deputy Chief Information Officer for the International Trade Administration happy to be here to support thank you for having me Sharon yes my name is Sharon Williams um I'm a member of the AAPI uh ERG and I'm here to moderate today and to um give any support I can um to this effort and my day job is uh working for first net that's the First Responder Network Authority um and I'm an administrative assistant all right so Cisco would like to very quickly introduce yourself and then we will begin my name is Cisco Roman I'm the sign language interpreter in the Department of Commerce uh I'm African American person I have wavy hair which is of course salt and pepper colored and I have a thick mustache which is also salt and pepper colored I have on a blue and white polo shirt thank you sir so we will now begin our formal programming uh Miss Williams please begin ah yes thank you we have some questions for our three panelists and um this question these questions will apply to all of them so if one as one answers the question the others can be thinking about those questions so um please tell us about expressing yourself and your heritage through ART your art and writings um please share with us um one or two challenges you've had to overcome and how this experience how this helped you? what is it you wish for the audience to know about your background? and how your Expressions have shaped you? um so who's gonna answer first um I think it's ye okay fine all right? I will answer uh a challenge for me there were two actually two challenges for me biggest challenge I would say considering my lifetime communication getting communication across language Second Challenge for me the lack of Asian deaf artist in the art world. the first challenge because I'm deaf of course and in my lifetime that's been an ongoing challenge I've tried to overcome that challenge the best way I could in my life trying to take care of oh I see I keep trying to overcome that challenge and I grab the opportunities whenever I can my skills the skills that I've acquired I'd like to share them with people who appreciate art. people who trust me and my artwork and I will have collaboration opportunities the biggest challenge has been the communication of course and then there's a lack of Asian deaf artist in mainstream art world in the mainstream art world you can't find any deaf Asian artists only one that I know of so far my art itself allows me to express my opinions my emotions in different ways allows me to get over some of those communication barriers one of the murals that I've painted is called Deaf AAPI Experience it's at Union Market in Washington DC in that in that District area in May we celebrate a AAPI month and I've been considering for a long time how to show the Asian-American influence the culture sorry everything is all pixelated I'm sorry it's all pixelated again yeah it's all pixelated um perhaps if you come off camera everybody else off camera for a minute if we all come off camera still oh okay let's see no close it down then open up again let's no that's not working try try I'm sorry it's it's pixelated again I'm sorry I can't see you ye I'm sorry it's very isolated um how about we oh so it's her internet Junish said it's her bandwidth so know we see very importantly for those of you who worked for the I uh the Commerce Bureau called NTIA National Telecommunication Information Administration why the internet for all and Broadband access um program funded by the US Department of Commerce is so important you see how uh deaf Americans would be at a disadvantage when they don't have high-speed internet and joining the rest of us on video calls uh I understand that our third panelist Mr Len Tran is in the audience but he cannot be uh he cannot unmute his mic so uh Len would you mind raising your hand please so Felicia can rescue you in the meantime I'll ask our panelist Sarah Soon-Ling Blackburn to please uh respond to the questions of course and yes I I think about um I live and work in Mississippi and I a lot of my research background is actually in rural education and Rural access and so thinking about the internet and Technology um is such a it's such an interesting piece that we don't often think about when we're talking about art connection inclusion all of the topics today so I know that wasn't the point of the panel today but it's um yeah it's it's an important piece of the puzzle so the question is about you know expressing myself through writing some of the challenges I had to overcome I think I always wanted to be a writer I was one of those kids who would you know scribble down stories and um we had an old typewriter and I just love to write things on it or or write things out by hand um but I never thought that it could be an actual option for me as an adult and part of that is because the advice that so often you're given as a writer is to write about what you know and it's good advice but when I was young I thought well nobody's going to want to read what I know because I didn't see many stories from people who looked like me who had my background not only my Asian-American background but also the fact that I have an international background um my mother is Malaysian Chinese because my dad was an American Diplomat we moved all the time so I'm what they call a third culture kid I grew up in all of these different countries Tokyo Beijing um I was born in Bangkok and you know my experience just seemed so different from everything else that the idea of writing about it um didn't necessarily make sense when this book book exclusion in the Chinese American story which I have here um when it was when I was asked to potentially write this book I had a lot of impostor syndrome you know one um like most Americans I didn't learn any of these histories when I was in school myself so how do you write about something that you didn't necessarily have access to and then two I had the question yes I am Chinese and American but am I Chinese American enough you know what does that mean I don't have the direct line to somebody who came and lived in San Francisco and then worked on the Railroad and kind of the the traditional maybe stereotypical story of who a Chinese American person is but through the course of writing obviously it became clear that there is no one way to be Chinese American that you can be biracial you can be a newer immigrant you could be adopted and then by extension realizing that you know just as Chinese American is sort of this richly diverse group so too is Asian America or Asian America Native Hawaiian Pacific island America um and realizing that yes these categories um are very large and very diverse but they're not meant to erase our individual stories that both things can coexist at the same time the idea that you know I'm I'm very proud to call myself Malaysian Chinese and have my very specific story and also can be very proud to to call myself AANHPI and through that to feel solidarity connection belonging to some people whose backgrounds are actually maybe very different from mine on the surface um and so you know in a lot of ways the process of writing this was it was healing and it was this recognition of um yeah like you know my story is is valid too and then hearing from people who've been reading the book since it came out from adults and young people alike um the way that they're reacting to it like wow I didn't know that our histories go back so far in the United States or people who are not Chinese American saying wow I didn't realize how my group has connections to your group or all of these overlaps in history um it's made me feel even more you know resolved than ever that it's so important for us to to look for where invisibility in terms of storytelling might exist and then to try to use use art you know public art I love the work that Yi does but also writing and other forms of art to um you know make some of us feel a little bit less invisible and to recognize that America has all of these different components that make us who we are awesome so I see that we have found our third panelist he has been stranded um somewhere else and uh I I understand some of our audience also got stranded so my apologies to all of you who may have missed the first part uh this is recorded uh so if you wish to go back and catch the slideshow or the first part of the conversation uh hopefully you would be able to later uh Len please introduce yourself sir and then uh answer the question if you would thank you sure thank you very much and talking about stranded I'm I'm gonna take everyone back in history for a little bit and how uh my book came about back after the fall of Saigon uh in 1975 um seven years later in 1982 um millions of of Vietnamese were leaving the country because uh you know we were living under a different government that we feel that we need more than just living there you know our lives were taken away uh everything have changed so in 1982 uh my dad grabbed me by the arm and he said Len why why don't we go to the city and and visit your uncle and you know being just a an 8-year-old child I was like yeah Dad you can take me anywhere besides you know living in the countryside and taking care of the pigs and the chickens and so uh when I looked at my dad and I said dad are we gonna go with Mom and you know my siblings and dad said no it just only be both of us and you know I I didn't think of anything much of it and so I went with dad walked along the beach and when we got to this strange house and I I asked Dad I said dad what this is not the direction to go see uh Uncle the city this is this is kind of different and that's like you don't don't worry about it we're gonna have dinner and and we're gonna uh sleep here for the night so uh once again I didn't think anything of it I I was just so excited to go see my uncle in the city and that night we had dinner along with you know people who I don't even know and and so when we finished he said why don't you just go to the corner and and sleep over there at dawn a strange man picked me up put me on his shoulder and just ran across the beach and then just just threw me into the boat and I I scream and so he covered my mouth and he said shut up you're gonna get us killed and when he turned around I was I grabbed onto the the side of the the boat and about to jump out and then I heard a voice said Len just sit still and when I looked up it was my dad and so he was with bunch of other men pushing the boat out to the sea and sitting in front of me were women and children and then when the boat gained buoyancy he jumped in along with other men and when the captain revved the engine and when we went out to sea and when the land was vanished from our sight the captain and turn off the engine and said it's time to find freedom and so I looked at at dad I was like freedom what what what what are you talking about how how about how about Mom and and and my siblings and dad didn't even say a word and I could see the tears riming down the corner of his eyes and at that time I I just wanted to hold his hand and put my face onto his chest and and just be with the person who I trusted and loved most and that became my journey to come to America we got stranded for 21 days at sea before we got rescued and after living in the in Hong Kong refugee camp for three months and then later on in in the Philippines um for another six months where we had to learn English before we were able to sponsor to America so in 1982 uh dad and I were brought to the South Bronx of New York City now where I had to I had to adapt to this new culture I didn't know any English at all very little that I've learned uh from the Philippines refugee camp and it was very difficult to assimilate into this this new culture and there there were days that we had to um roam the streets of New York City just to find whatever that we can savage and the first piece of furniture that we savaged was actually a mattress what we found in the dumpster and and it became my mattress for a very long time so growing up I've always always have this thought that you know I I would never be able to fit in in America that my my English was not good enough and so you know impostor syndrome is like constantly you know kicking in until uh three years ago suddenly out of nowhere my daughter knocked on my door and she said uh she said dad can can you tell me how you and Grandpa were able to survive uh uh in that boat journey as a Vietnamese boat people and so that's when um it just something just ignited in me and and and fuel me to to write my book which is that memoir entitled Split Up by the Sea uh and uh similar to what Sarah had mentioned earlier um you know I I went to school I studied engineering and you figured you know and engineer doesn't want to write all we want to do is just sit in the corner and and just you know solve our formals uh but I I felt that you know it time for me to embrace my story so that um other people can understand you know what we went through as Vietnamese immigrants uh and and and the reason why we study so hard is not like you know uh um we become so good in math or or whatever subject that we want to study it's because that we went through so much uh in our lives um that we we just learned to persevere and through you know those 21 days in the middle of the ocean and you know eight months as living as refugees and then you know 20 plus years you surviving in New York City it just it just gives me that discipline that drive to become a better person and and I'm proud that you know I can speak for other Vietnamese boat people uh by writing this book so I'm going to I know one of our panelists has to leave at one but I want her to hear uh the answer to this question so my apologies to the moderators for jumping in but Len you have two so there the first part is what you explained and then obviously we now know from your bio that you are a supervisor uh in the US Patent and Trademark Office that means you have moved up in the ranks uh and number two you wrote a book uh called Breaking Bricks or Break the Bricks uh would you mind telling us the second part of that story please yes so again let's go back to the impostor syndrome right um you know we always have this thought of you know fear self-doubt not believing in ourselves um so I I figure you know now that I finished writing my memoir I I want to write another book a book that I can inspire people so as a GS15 and the uh USPTO the patent office for the last 17 years uh 17 years I actually wanted to write this book for my employees because I want to empower them I want them to show them the way that you know we can believe in ourselves we have this system this beliefs um and write halfway halfway through writing uh Break the Bricks I was like you know what I can make this for every everybody it doesn't have to be just only for my employees and and I was so proud that I was able to place a lot of what I have learned uh during my 21 days stranded in the sea and and also you know how how I came about and and and how I struggled throughout my entire life and so yes Break the Bricks you know came about and was published back in October 2023 all right we have questions uh from the audience in the chat so moderators please everyone uh we have uh the first question for Yi uh who are your role models who inspired you despite not having other um Asian American artists who are death Cisco you're on mute okay okay the inspiration comes from Peking Opera the Peking Opera because their art is very special it's very very special and it's very active Betty be Beauty Betty Beauty was a designer who also inspired me thank you thank you Yi Wang uh the next question we have is for Len were you ever were you ever ever able able to reunite with the rest of your family yes um so after almost 10 years of living in America until my father was almost done with his education getting his bachelor degree uh and this is at the age of almost 40 that you know he was able to go back to school get his GED sitting with 19 20 year old kids uh got his bachelor degree and then suddenly out of nowhere we got this phone call from Hong Kong and it was my mom she she made a collect call and she said you know I am in in Hong Kong right now uh with with your siblings and you know we were just so surprised and we're like how how did you get there and so she also became a boat person herself so then after three months of her living Hong Kong we act we sponsor her here to America thank you thank you Len and I think we have another question um I think for uh for both uh Yi Wang and uh and our authors Sarah Soon-Ling maybe uh it's about most Asian parents do not encourage a career in arts for the children how do your parents feel about your career any panelists or all panelists feel free yes um Yi I'm answering my mother and father now live in Beijing and they still support support my art as I was growing up um they loved you know my passion for art and so they they supported me my mom is an art lover and she could draw also she was very good artist herself and of course my mom and we went to our first Starbucks together and so from that I did get the Starbucks mural that I painted and I got that opportunity there was no competition for it or any kind of a selection panel or anything like that there was nothing of that sort um I just talked with my father and he said hey Starbucks why not see they're very supportive why not see if maybe they will let you put a mural there so there are 25 people at the Starbucks in Washington DC and then I'm sorry I'm having a problem say it again say it again the Starbucks had a large heart had a large heart a large hearing heart and so my father said why don't you go to Starbucks and see if they will allow you to put up a mural there in the deaf Starbucks in Northeast Washington I said oh no no no I didn't think so I I really don't think so why would I sell my art to Starbucks and my father said you can try at least try keep trying keep trying and it was about two or three weeks my father kept encouraging me again and again and again for two weeks he just kept encouraging me and luck would have it that there was a South there was an Asian-American person there who happened to like my art cherish it there was some people who had very rich experiences and so I did listen to my father and I sent him an email with a with a PDF attached to it with a picture of my art and I sent that to Starbucks also to their art program after about 20 minutes they said they were interested so the opportunity was there and it's been onward and upward ever since I had to be alert to the opportunities that were presented very inspirational that's very inspirational story thank you Yi Wang Sarah Soon-Ling yes like to share I would this is a great question because when I was growing up I didn't I I heard the the stereotype right Asian parents don't want you to go into the Arts you need to be a doctor you need to be a engineer you know stem just go into stem and I didn't really understand where it it came from because I had grown up so much in Asia I was really surrounded by Asian art Yi mentioned Peking Opera um you know which is what I often heard in my grandparents home or just out on the streets in Beijing you'd hear you know traditional music um you know there's such a rich tradition of visual arts musical arts all kind of Arts um storytelling across Asia and yet we have this idea that like our Asian parents or at least Asian-American parents don't want us to go into the Arts and it always kind of baffled me right like why is that the case and it goes back to that thing I was saying about why it's so important to understand our history um so most Asian immigrants most Asian people in the United States today came after 1965 the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act Immigration and Nationality Act and that law really framed the immigration system we have today and it put um it it both opened up immigration to far more groups so refugee groups like Len's family um but also put a strong preference on people with skills in backgrounds like science medicine engineering technology these fields that are traditionally associated with Asian-Americans today so now naturally if you're recruiting for mathy people then you're going to have more mathy people right um and so my mother when I wanted to be a writer when I wanted to be a teacher she was like no no no no no no no you won't be successful that's not the path because the story she had been told is the path to success in the United States is to be one of these very specific careers which was funny to me because she's she was a teacher she was a teacher herself um she loves the Arts and I think I think that comes from fear a lot of times right because we don't we don't travel across an ocean we don't risk so much for our our children to struggle and so the fear was she didn't want me to struggle and once she saw oh you can be happy successful um fulfilled and not just like monetarily but also in a much more holistic human way by being a teacher by being an artist then now she couldn't be prouder and so that's the story I often try to tell um I work with some AAPI parent groups and try to tell them the same thing look like our young people Asian-American Pacific Islander young people have pretty high rates of mental health struggle because they feel like if they don't fit into that box then they don't know what their other options are and we have to help you know expand the idea we need to share the stories of artists like Yi we need to tell the stories of families like Len's because through those examples one of my favorites is the story of a man named Tyrus Wong um I'm sure everyone here can visualize Bambi and this is the artist who who painted the background art that moody forest that is so part of the American imagination is a Chinese American artist who combined Chinese and Western watercolor techniques and it's sort of infused into American culture but most of us don't know those stories but if we do know them maybe we can have you know more experiences and more people who are out there showing up as you know in all of the ways that we can be successful thank you so much Sarah Soon-Link thank you for that story um very very encouraging for or uh other stereotype uh family uh parents that who want their children to be in the STEM field uh how about uh Len Tran yes certainly I would love to chime in uh with that discussion as well I I believe that everything uh depends on the circumstances and also the environment so for my situation uh was because when we came here in 1982 uh Dad just wanted you know to to find a a job right and uh you know he was working at a pizzeria uh you know washing pots and pans dishes making you know $2.25 cents an hour right so then back in Vietnam uh as as as Vietnamese you you think about doctors or engineers and uh you know something within the stem major so the very first thing he uh placed in his mind was okay I'm I'm I'm I'm gonna get you know either a technical degree uh or at least you know in a bachelor in engineering so while he was going to school he was also you know putting that in my head as well he's like look Len you know Dad Dad is struggling and and and I don't want to see you struggle as well so you know while I'm I'm I'm do my homework and do my math why don't you sit there and do your math on the side and and I remember that day when I uh was about to enter college right I I said dad I I think I want to you know study something in Liberal Arts I want to do you know psychology and it's like uh then you know he he brought me back to you know that scene in 1982 again when we we're in the boat and how we struggle and again you Sarah talked about fear and again his his fears he he wants me to also you know have a a stable career and um that that stem would probably give me that kind of opportunity um so that's what I did I was like okay you know what uh let let me put psychology on the side a little bit and I'm I'm going to be engineer so I studied to be a chemical engineer but right right after when I finished my chemical engineering you know Dad was proud of me and he said okay you know now now it's time for you to go back and and study what you love and that is exactly what I'm doing with my daughter right now and you know she uh she has this this ability where she picks up you know music and and arts to you just like that and I said you know what just just do what you are happy it's because you know right now her environment and her circumstances are different uh compared to mine thank you Len Tran and that also um if I summarize uh all from the three panelists um opportunities are everywhere and we all have different um potentials uh even if we study in mechanical engineering and if we have passion in arts we can also pursue um artistic work so thank you very much all for sharing your stories uh I do have uh more questions in the chat uh this one is Sarah how did you find the South um your when you first got there after an international background please tell us why Mississippi feels like home for you oh this is a good question I think you if you had asked me when I was a teenager you know where are you going to live then you had told me it would be Mississippi or the Deep South I would have been I would have been so surprised in fact I might have been surprised to learn that I would end up staying in the United States permanently um because I grew up moving back and forth and so much of my family is in Malaysia but also in other places because you know Malaysia was a a British colony so so many of my relatives have gone to other um former colonies as well to New Zealand to Australia people to the UK um various parts of the world so we're really spread out and I just figured I grew up moving I'll always keep moving and yet I've lived here um I moved to Mississippi actually I think exactly well almost exactly 15 years ago moved to the Deep South 15 years ago um and so this very much feels like home now there are a few things um one you know I had very this again goes to my point about invisibility and lack of history that the stories I had heard about the Deep South were very negative mostly um and when I moved here I found that you know a lot of those things are based in truth they are based in true difficult histories and anytime you see stories of oppression of prejudice uh you know you will always find stories of people who resisted it's no coincidence that the that the south is also the heart of the American Civil Rights Movement the source of you know resistance solidarity organizing and all of these things and yet that part of the story wasn't highlighted for me when I was growing up um so that was that was one piece of the puzzle that made me realize there's so much here that's so beautiful and rich and wonderful and communal that I I just didn't I wasn't aware of um on another part of it is I didn't know that there were Asian people here so when I first moved to the South I was actually living in a very very small town in Arkansas and I I was driving through and this town is on a lake and there was a dock on the lake and it had like a pagoda at the end of the dock and I was like what you know what's happening here so I pulled over and I got out and I'm just kind of looking at it and this man comes out of his house this this Chinese man comes out of his house and he starts was talking to me in the thickest southern accent I had ever heard in my life up until that point and you know he's like hey who are you welcome like I I've never seen you before you know he had a case of Bud Light he's bringing out like he's like so excited and this man his family had been there for generations um you know they owned the grocery store in the town they were part of this this long history of Mississippi Delta Chinese that some of you might have heard about because there have been some articles in the last few years but I had no idea um and so realizing that you know it's not just California and the railroads and all of this that actually there were Asian people who were brought first um to the South to work on on as sharecroppers um because you know again all of our histories are kind of intermingled that after the end of the SEC after the end of the American Civil War when um so many formerly enslaved people left or had self-emancipated or um you know no longer wanted to work on the cotton plantations and they were looking for cheap sources of labor that Asian people were for a time thought to like fill in that gap I didn't know about those connected histories um and so learning that you know has made me realize like all of our stories our whole country is is full of these rich complicated intermingled stories um you know if you can be happy in a place it doesn't matter where that place is right it matters that it makes sense for you for your family and all of those kinds of things thank you Sarah and that sounds just like your book you can be any Asian American or American Asian or Asian American in because there's so many stories about each of us so that's wonderful I think I have a followup question in the chat what contribution the Asian Americans in the Deep South you think the audience should know well thank you for mentioning the book May so I will say that a lot of the stories I've mentioned already are ones that you can read about in the book um and it's very accessible it's also very affordable so it's not like a you know a dense textbook so I recommend that um but I think that you know there are a lot of stories of resistance in the South um I think about the fishing you know fishing communities on the Gulf Coast who really organized for better labor practices for um stronger working conditions and these are stories that we don't often hear about right and I actually think about not just in the South but across the United States there's this idea that Asian people are you know we just passive um when actually there's so many stories of young Asian-Americans like Mabel Ping-hua who advocated for women's rights to vote that's the story we don't often hear about or the story of Larry Itlong who's a Filipino farm worker who worked alongside Cesar Chavez Delores Huerta advocating again for labor rights um and I think that you know we as we as a country need to learn these stories as well thank you um I don't think we have any more questions um from the audience well May um since uh may I interrupt real quickly our um we have um our Chief Diversity Officer uh who is on the call as well as the uh Office Director of The Office of Civil Rights and this event uh would uh well it benefits greatly from the support of the Commerce Department Office of Civil Rights and so I want to take a moment to ask our Chief Diversity Officer to say a few words uh Junish the mic is yours uh thank you Ann and um first of all I really want to thank our three uh amazing panelists uh Yi Wang uh Dr Sarah Soon-Ling Blackburn and Len Tran our very own USPTO's uh Len Tran uh for uh really sharing uh their experiences as artists as as Asians as uh historians as visual artists um as as chroniclers uh I I think they really captured the theme of expressing yourself so well and I think for Asian-American uh communities uh we we need to express ourselves more we need to share our our talents our experiences our challenges uh our triumphs um of course I also want to thank uh Ann Ngo the uh president of the AAPI ERG and Sharon Williams the president of the differing abilities ERG for uh putting on this great program uh in addition to uh Felicia Harris from uh the Office of Civil Rights and uh Cisco Roman uh for his uh stellar uh sign language translation as always uh this month uh is uh a great opportunity to celebrate Asian-Americans and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders uh the the community's diversity of cultures and breath of achievements and and the leaders and the artists and the authors continue to shape a brighter future for all of us uh you might be surprised to know that we currently within the United States have a really robust population of 22.4 million Asians and 1.8 million Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders here at the Department of Commerce we believe that representation matters and all communities deserve opportunity for economic growth and opportunity DOC is committed to equity and inclusion and we've initiated many steps to advance equity justice and opportunity for Asian-Americans and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander communities through the Office of Civil Rights we support the White House Initiative on Advancing Equity Justice an opportunity for Asian-Americans Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders this order mandates federal agencies to address systemic barriers and opportunities and benefits to advance equity justice and opportunity for the AA and NHPI communities to demonstrate its commitment for the next two years the department has identified four concrete actions that it will take to benefit the AA and NHPI communities as well as the overall DOC workforce those goals are disaggregating our data products to ensure greater detailed reporting and accuracy working with AA and NHPI community-based organizations Chambers of Commerce Minority Serving Institutions or NAPCY organizations uh to become grantees MOU and strategic partners and clients of the bureaus under the department conducting listening sessions with our employees to ensure equitable promotions promoting uh career resources and career development programs and opportunities including uh building a cross bureau working group staffing a cross bureau working group to identify specific steps and barriers to career advancement these goals were developed through the department uh White House Initiatives AANHPI working group um these efforts also align to the Department's uh diversity equity and inclusion strategic plan 22 to 26 and will be monitored by the Department's Equity Council so I want to thank all of us for participating I think uh we had about 125 uh participants at at one time so thank you for your time we know it's valuable really appreciate you learning about these uh amazing uh AANHPI artists and authors and with that I'll turn it back to Ann thank you well thank you so much everyone and before we lose uh most of you um on May 30th uh please join us for a presentation is an inter agency presentation about uh indigenous technology uh Native Hawaiian fish ponds and so that I will share information about that for anyone who may have missed it the first time around but but um our very own board member Francis uh Sakaguchi is with the Economic Development ad uh Administration part of Commerce Department uh she will be a part of that effort and I look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible uh please join us uh and to learn about how indigenous uh how Native Hawaiian culture and wisdom and knowledge can help us navigate these climate change times thank you very much everyone and um if there are any last minute comments or questions May uh please take it away and anyone who needs to drop off please feel free to do so the last question was someone uh asking about uh Len Tran's book on Amazon uh we already answer that so thanks Len Tran and uh of course uh if other people are interested in uh Dr Sarah's uh books uh I think it's also on Dr Sarah's uh website directly I didn't find it on is it available on Amazon as well oh I search on anywhere books are sold you can find it Amazon well thank you so much everyone and thank you to our amazing moderators Sharon Williams and May Chung who are also by the way for those of you who are not aware they're also uh champions of the different abilities uh employees and folks among us who uh do not communicate the same way uh as the rest of us and now I think today you've seen an example of the challenges faced by those who um have different abilities so I hope this will encourage you to uh learn more and to um be more patient with others who may need um a little extra time to express themselves thank you very much everyone uh have a great fantastic day