Events
09.29.2018 – No-No Boy multi-media performance
No-No Boy will perform at the Midwest Buddhist Temple on September 29, 2018 at 7pm. With special guest Ho Etsu Taiko. Tickets available via https://www.eventbrite.com/e/no-no-boy-concert-with-special-guest-ho-etsu-taiko-tickets-48412159071
Past Events
02.24.2018 – The Orange Story film screening and discussion
Riksha Magazine and Banyan, Asian American Writers Collective, in partnership with the Oak Park Public Library, presents a screening of The Orange Story, a short film directed by Erika Street Hopman about one’s man journey and the injustice of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.
Summary from IMDB:
The Orange Story is a narrative short film that tells the story of an elderly Japanese American man who must sell all his belongings and report to a temporary detention center during WWII from where he will be forcibly removed to an undisclosed location. The film also uses archival radio, film, and photographic sources to complement this narrative, providing a strong historical context for the story.
Please join us after the screening for a discussion about the film and the personal journeys that humanize this tragedy in our nation’s history.
A special panel of guests will be present including: Jason Matsumoto, executive producer of The Orange Story, Lourdes Nicholls, whose family was incarcerated in Manzanar, Joe Takehara who stars in the film, and Karen Su, who teaches in the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Special performance by Chicago’s Ho Etsu Taiko.
WHEN: Saturday, February 24, 2018, 2:30-4:30pm.
WHERE: Oak Park Public Library, Veterans Room
834 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL
Banyan: Asian American Writers Collective and Riksha Magazine are honored to present a Women’s Justice & Empowerment gathering featuring M. Evelina Galang, who will read from her new book, Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living with War.
Please join us on Saturday, December 9th at 2pm at the Oak Park Public Library, 834 Lake Street.
This event will include a discussion and book signing and will provide opportunities to learn about the women featured in Lolas’ House and efforts to empower women globally. We hope you can join us for the special event. Recommended audience is high school age or older.
From Lolas’ House:
“During World War II more than one thousand Filipinas were kidnapped by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lolas’ House tells the stories of the sixteen surviving Filipino “comfort women”.
M. Evelina Galang enters the lives of the women at Lolas’ House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture (*Scholars believe 400,000 women were abducted and forced to work as “comfort women” during World War II*).
Lolas’ House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas’ House to the world.”
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/lolas-house
M. Evelina Galang has been researching and documenting the lives of surviving Filipino “comfort women” since 1999. She is the author of several books and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Galang directs the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and board member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA). http://www.mevelinagalang.com