Brooklyn community organizer Hong Mei Pang was disappointed as she looked out over the tens of thousands of people crowding the National Mall during a rally for immigration reform earlier this spring.
The crowd that had descended on Washington, D.C. included a great many undocumented immigrants like Pang, yet she felt as if she were an outsider amid the sea of humanity.
“We felt kind of alienated,” said Pang, 23, who was born in Singapore and moved to New York when she was 14. “There weren’t many Asian-American faces.”
Many undocumented Latino students have gone public with their stories, but it’s far less common for Asian-Americans to do the same — even though Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and activist Jose Antonio Vargas, arguably the country’s most high-profile undocumented immigrant, is from the Philippines.
About 1.3 million of the country’s 11.5 million undocumented immigrants were born in Asia, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates.
“It’s not an issue that’s very broadly talked about within the Asian-American community until very recently, because there’s such a culture of silence that surrounds the issue,” Pang explained.
“It’s very much stigmatized, so you don’t really talk about it. Initially, my own reaction when I heard there were other undocumented Asian youth coming out, I was like: That’s crazy! Why would they do that? And then fast-forward two years later, I’m doing it.”
Pang and 13 other members of an activist group known as RAISE — Revolutionizing Asian American Immigrant Stories on the East Coast — hope to change this mindset with a new, soul-baring theater project called UndocuAsians.
“We’re out here and we want people to understand our unique struggles,” she said.
The group, whose members hail from a wide range of countries — from Bangladesh to China to Suriname — is supported by the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund and meets in its offices twice a month. Often, meetings become a forum at which undocumented Asian immigrants can feel safe to share personal stories.
RAISE decided to showcase those tales in a scripted theater performance that debuts at the Culture Project on Monday. They also are posting them to Tumblr site raiseourstory.tumblr.com.
“No fiction. Just — raw,” Pang said.
They’re going to share immigration stories past and current realities — whether the tales are those of high school students, restaurant workers or college grads. The participants range in age from 18-30.
Pang’s going to tell of leaving Singapore — and the grandparents who raised her — in the 90s when her parents lost everything in the Asian financial crisis. Her grandfather is now very old and sick, but Pang can’t leave the U.S. if she wants to return.
“I’m nervous I’m going to cry on stage,” said Pang.
Neriel David Ponce — an 18-year-old whose family left a privileged life in the Philippines for a crowded one-bedroom Staten Island apartment when he was 5 — said he, too, is worried about controlling his emotions. He’s going to describe fighting with his parents after learning he was undocumented in high school.
“I was always questioning them, ‘Why would you bring me to this country?'” he said. “You’re getting all my hopes up; you’re making me think I’m going to end up at an Ivy League [school]; you’re telling me to work hard — but there’s no point.”
He has friends who will be in the audience Monday who haven’t heard his story before, he said.
“I find it easier talking to strangers,” said Ponce. “With my friends, they’re aware, but I haven’t really told them. I’m kind of scared to. So I’m just going to try to keep myself sane as I’m speaking to the audience.”
epearson@nydailynews.com
