A year after Kansas City rallied around them, AAPI community says they’re overlooked again

Last May, Kri Chay, a first-generation Cambodian American, stood beside Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas with a smile across his face. The city declared May Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and Chay was hopeful.

In the 12 months that followed, Chay waited eagerly for an announcement about a celebration, a festival, a fundraiser. Anything.

“I just thought that since the city declared something, that they would do something,” he said.

Finally, Chay, now 42 and the longtime owner of a Lee’s Summit gym, decided to get to work himself, mobilizing an event to bring together the AAPI community.

Chay is among a group of AAPI community members and small business owners who in the past couple of weeks stepped up and scrambled to bring together events to honor their communities.

And to remind Kansas City that they’re still here, and their stories still matter.

A Taste of AAPI

Chay’s roomy gym, which he’s owned for nearly a decade, is filled with artwork of superheroes.

But the real superhero in his life is his mother.

She fled violence in Cambodia in her early 20s, jumping from refugee camp to refugee camp. When Chay’s mother and father finally landed in Grinnell, Iowa, as refugees, they were five months pregnant with him.

Their legacy was on his mind when he was teaching a class at the gym last year and a post on social media caught his eye.

It was a young man attacking a 70-year-old Asian woman in California. Chay, whose mother was 71 at the time, felt his heart speed up.

Within 24 hours, he found a way to channel his anger into action, starting a streetwear company called AZN PRD. He recently celebrated its first anniversary.

“To me that means keeping your culture, keeping who you are, knowing where you came from and not losing what you have from your homeland,” Chay said of Asian pride.

A year later, he found himself similarly driven to act when no one else would.

A Taste of AAPI, a food-centered gathering Chay began planning about two weeks ago, is getting attention.

“Baby, this event is for us,” he tells his 12-year-old daughter. “It’s for us as a people. We have to keep the culture.”

Chay knows he can’t retain every piece of his family’s homeland. He speaks some Cambodian. His daughter knows less.

But food traditions, he said, he intends to preserve.

Chay is expecting a couple hundred people to attend his event, including his mother, who is coming down from Iowa to visit.

From 2 to 7 p.m. Sunday at his gym at 1036 Northeast Jib Court, there will be food from Cambodian, Hawaiian and Filipino community members. He said some Samoan friends are bringing a full pig to roast in the driveway. But he hopes people outside the AAPI community join in the celebration too.

“Open your mind a little bit. Open your hearts, open your stomachs,” he said.

Columbus Park AAPIHM Celebration

In March 2021, Jackie Nguyen brought together hundreds of people in the West Bottoms to listen to the stories of members of the AAPI community as part of a Stop Asian Hate vigil.

Stories of harassment. Racism. Violence.

Nguyen, who is first generation Vietnamese American, had just opened a coffee shop, Cafe Cà Phê, as a safe space for allyship and community.

This year, not much has changed, and much has changed.

There are still attacks against AAPI people, including the shooting of three Korean women at a Dallas hair salon earlier this month, an act of violence being investigated as a possible hate crime. But the mainstream attention isn’t there like before.

Nguyen still runs Cafe Cà Phê, but instead of running it out of a food truck, her team is working to build their first brick and mortar shop.

And, perhaps most notably, instead of vigils and cultural celebrations planned to honor and uplift the AAPI community, there’s mostly silence.

“We continue to fight so much just to feel like part of the community, and that’s really frustrating,” Nguyen said.

Last year when the city recognized May as AAPI Heritage Month, a large celebration was held across from City Hall. Nguyen thought it would become an annual event. But in late April, there was nothing planned by anyone, as far as she could tell.

With her money and time tied up in opening her shop, Nguyen again found herself reluctant to shoulder the task of organizing a big event. But at some point she realized if not her, who?

So around the same time Chay started brainstorming his celebration centered on food, Nguyen got to work planning her own event.

While she’s since garnered support from a fair share of small local businesses, and landed the Kansas City Royals as well as the city’s parks and recreation department as sponsors, Nguyen said next year, she hopes larger institutions come to her first, asking how they can help carry the load.

Saturday’s AAPIHM Celebration, planned from noon to 5 p.m. at Columbus Park, is a free, family-friendly event complete with performers, food trucks and small business pop-ups, all by members of the AAPI community. The non-AAPI businesses that joined the festivities will be donating a portion of their proceeds to an Asian mental health collective nonprofit. While there won’t be individual speakers like at last year’s vigil, Nguyen has organized a panel of local AAPI community members.

She encouraged anyone and everyone to come out, including non-AAPI community members who want to be better allies.

“I know you can’t understand, but you can try to at least listen and educate yourself,” she said.

Whatever Next AAPI Celebration

This is Adaline “Addie” Bara’s first time truly celebrating her AAPI heritage.

Growing up a Chinese American adoptee in Kansas City, Bara, now 26, said her childhood was at times racially and emotionally isolated. As she got older, she learned that while she was lucky enough to grow up around other adoptees, that’s not everyone’s story.

Bara, a co-founder of Whatever Next, a multi-media project she started with two other Chinese adoptees to bring about more conversations around race for transracial adoptees, is hosting her first public event on Sunday.

The point, she said, is to create more visibility and resources for the trans-racial adoptee community.

Bara recently moved back to Kansas City. While attention on the AAPI might have waned since last year, it’s still significant for Bara, who said she grew up surrounded by little representation.

“I didn’t experience any of this growing up,” she said. “I’m just happy it’s happening.”

Bara, who recently attended a Lunar New Year festival hosted by Cafe Cà Phê, said she met a number of white parents raising Asian adoptee children who weren’t aware of the resources and community available to them in Kansas City.

It’s part of why she’s making the move to host an event herself, in the hopes that she can make growing up a little better for the younger AAPI generation.

“Representation really matters,” she said.

The Whatever Next AAPI Month Celebration will be from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at Parlor, in the Crossroads. The public, family-friendly event will include several vendors, including Asian adoptees and AAPI owned businesses. Bara said Missouri House Rep. Emily Weber, the first Asian American woman elected to the Missouri General Assembly, also plans to attend.

A need for civic engagement

Pakou Her, 45, didn’t expect last year’s engagement and enthusiasm for the AAPI community to last.

After nearly 30 years of racial justice work, she knows the public doesn’t stay interested unless there’s a lot of media attention, or an opportunity for performative solidarity. Her, who is second-generation Asian American of Hmong descent, lives in Kansas City and works as a racial equity and social justice trainer at Tseng Development Group.

“When you ask the general public to engage in what should be a systemic and policy change issue by consuming, it’s not sustainable,” she said.

Her’s work revolves around the power of the ballot as a tool to uplift the AAPI community.

Her focus is on policies, especially on the federal level, that will benefit Asian Americans, and really any minority group, such as immigration policies and access to education and financial support, like the expanded child tax credit and paid family leave, she said.

While the approach other Kansas Citians are taking to increase visibility and support for the AAPI community is important, she said she is taking it from a different angle, fearing that when visibility and support stop being Instagrammable, it becomes less appealing for many people to support a movement.

So Her’s mission is to get the people who are eager to buy from a local AAPI business, or to wear “I support Asian-owned businesses” T-shirts, to also want to vote in a way that makes a difference for the AAPI community to create systemic change.

By the time May 2023 rolls around, Her hopes to see the cultural celebrations and festivities continue. But she also hopes to see voter registration booths sitting in their midst.

“This is a major time of crisis socially, economically and politically, for lots of people,” she said. “This is a high risk moment for a lot of communities, including Asian Americans.”