Letter from Boston

Naaap Meeting

By MASAKO YAMADA

Since I have much more free time now than I did during the semester, I've decided to look into various Boston organizations so that I can expand my horizons beyond my circle of close friends and classmates. I love my old friends but I also enjoy meeting new, different people ― and I'm finding this much harder to do now that I'm in graduate school. It's inevitable, since the people with whom I normally associate are within the department. Actually, I hear that this phenomenon is true among people who work full-time; I think this is why so many professional interest groups exist. They take the place of student clubs. In a way, they are even more diverse, since the members aren't limited to people from a certain college or a certain age group.

One of the first groups that I wanted to join was the local chapter of the National Association of Asian-American Professionals. Although I'm not technically an American, I made it a point of participating in Asian-American activities while I was in college and I miss that kind of activism in graduate school. I looked up the NAAAP Boston web page, wrote a query to the printed E-mail address and sent the organization a check for $20 (¥2,300). This has bought me membership to a pan-Asian-American organization that has one or two local events a month, one national event a year and countless unspecified perks outside the scheduled events by way of personal contact with members.

I attended my first NAAAP event today: it consisted of an excursion to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) followed by dinner at a local Cambodian-French restaurant. I'd only gone to the MFA two days before with my friend, but I was looking forward to looking at the exhibitions again with a new group of people. What I didn't realize was that it would be impossible for us to enjoy the art collectively. With about 20 people, the group was simply too big. After a while, I didn't want to tag along with the cumbersome group (it was even worse than a tour group, since most of the members knew each other well and were eagerly chatting away), so I decided to look at the exhibits by myself. After a while, I noticed that the group had dispersed into smaller groups, so I guess most of the other people felt the same way.

Dinner was interesting, since the 18 of us all sat at one long table. Ordering the food, yelling out personal introductions and trying to coordinate the check were minor headaches, but the general spirit of the dinner was cheerful and pleasant. At 23, I was the youngest member there (and one of very few students), but I enjoyed talking with the older men and women. It's not very surprising that I didn't click with all of them, but I didn't get the sense that it was particularly because of people's age or job status: rather, I saw that many of them grew up thinking they were American ― which is what they are ― and I realized that I am different.

The other group that I' m eyeing (besides a chamber music group at the local conservatory) is called Pacific Link. The name of the group makes it sound like another Asian-American networking organization, but it's actually a loose-knit group of Japanese graduate students, who are mostly transient. Many of them are in the professional fields of law, business and public policy. In many respects, I've lead a different life from these students as well; it remains to be seen whether I can derive continuing satisfaction from being a part of this group.

Obviously, the overall feel of each ― NAAAP and Pacific Link ― is very different, but I can't say which I prefer. What I realize, however, is that these groups both offer something that I can't quite achieve with my Chinese classmates at BU, in spite of our similar lives: I can express myself freely, in my own language, be it English or Japanese. I'd like to say that good intentions and gestures are all that matter, but in fact this ease of verbal communication means so much to me.

Shukan ST: June 13, 1997

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