Students from different schools attend the 2023 Asian American Footsteps Conference.
The 2023 Asian American Footsteps Conference (AAFC) kicked off its first in-person session since the onset of the Covid-19 lock down in 2019 on Sunday, April 16 with 12 Choate students who traveled to St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire.
AAFC offers an inclusive and safe space for high school students within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities to come together and discuss their experiences, learn about AAPI-related issues, and encourage each other to embrace their cultural identities. This fitting sentiment is marked by this year’s theme, “Building Bridges, Connecting our Heritage and Future.” In past years, AAFC conferences have been held at St. Mark’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy, The Hotchkiss School, Deerfield Academy, and many other independent schools in New England.
Katherine Chong ’25, who attended the conference, said “A lot of young Asian Americans in boarding schools are very interested in connecting and sharing … in the sense that there’s people searching for a collective identity and to be together in solidarity.”
Chong described the environment of the conference to be very “student-driven.” She added, “Even when we met a lot of Deerfield students, for example, we joked about the rivalry, but there ended up just being so much connection and similarity, and [it was] very interesting hearing [about] the Asian or DEI experience at different schools.”
Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion Ms. Jillian Forgue really enjoyed attending the conference in-person, and said that “watching [students] make connections — taking selfies with each other, hugging each other, getting everyone’s contact information, networking, laughing, and just having so much representation in one space — was really cool.”
The conference began with registration and a brief welcome from the St. Paul’s School Rector Kathleen “Kathy” Carroll Giles. Participants then attended three different student-led 50-minute workshops. To close off the conference, everybody gathered in the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul to hear from the 2023 AAFC Keynote Speaker, Madalene Xuan-Trang Mielke, President and CEO of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS).
There was a vast selection of workshops for students attending the conference to choose from. Some examples include “Supreme Court and Asian American Rights,” “Generation 1<X: Asian-ness Inferiority,” “International Schools: Pockets of Globalization,” and “The ‘Asian Fetish’ and Its Effects on Asian Americans.”
Fiona Fu ’25, Katherine Chong ’25, and Peyton Li ’25 led their own workshop called “Cracking the Bamboo Ceiling,” which shed light on an issue that many Asian Americans face in the workplace. Known as the bamboo ceiling, this term describes how Asian Americans who work at high-level institutions face obstacles in obtaining higher management leadership positions.
For Chong, the workshop addressed “the stereotype of Asians being hard workers that keep their head down and do all the work without advocating for themselves or [being] assertive enough to lead. ” It discussed why students thought the issue existed, how it might impact Asian Americans now and in the future, whose responsibility it was to dismantle it, and what could be done to best prevent it in the future. Even though they couldn’t make it through the entire presentation with the 50-minute time constraint, Fu said that the workshop went smoothly.
When asked if she thought the conference could be improved, Ms. Forgue said that she wished the conference was longer, and proposed that instead of three 50-minute workshops, the workshops could be narrowed down into two longer workshops. Additionally, she wished that there was more down-time at the end of the conference for students and adults to simply hang out, debrief, and network: “At the end, the kids were playing volleyball and hanging out, and it would’ve been so fun to stay for a little bit and experience joy together, but we had a three-hour ride to look forward to.”
AAFC will be taking place at the Governor’s Academy next year. Students who are members of the AAPI community at Choate are highly encouraged to host a workshop or simply attend the conference and explore the myriad of perspectives and identities that AAFC unveils.
