On Tuesday evening, the Asian American Cultural Center hosted “Imagining Just Futures” — a panel dedicated to transforming moments of despair, frustration and uncertainty into action and joy. 

Part of this year’s Pan Asian American Heritage Month, or PAAHM, programming at Yale, the panel featured Chris Lapinig ’07 LAW ’13, Minh Vu ’20 GRD ’26, Pranav Jani ’93 and Quan Tran GRD ’16 in an intergenerational conversation moderated by AACC student leaders Kenny Li ’25 and Michelle Lee ’26. 

The panel was held in the MENACC Suite. Multiple panelists spoke to the power of hosting the panel in a room that did not exist just last year; the new MENACC space was inaugurated this past October.

“It is my hope that … you can really reflect on your individual and collective power,” said AACC Director Joliana Yee, “and that this community keynote can be a source of hope and inspiration.”

In times of uncertainty, Yee said that she viewed the community as a tool of resilience. 

Touching on the theme of cultural communities, Ohio State University professor and Yale College alumnus Pranav Jani reflected on his own experience with Yale’s South Asian Society as a student. The organization would be a crucial step in his journey to becoming an organizer and activist, said Jani. There, he would also meet his future wife. 

“There’s a dialectic between the past and the future, we only imagine the futures that we can actually imagine because we were ready to imagine those futures,” said Jani. “Consciousness is always changing. Never think that we are fixed.” 

Jani told audiences about an anecdote regarding an anti-war rally held on the New Haven Green in 1991 protesting against the Iraq War. He remembered standing at the outskirts of the group of protestors, just close enough to be affiliated but far enough to keep some ideological distance between himself and what he believed at the time to be “extreme.”

According to Jani, ideas of consciousness are constantly in motion. In contrast to his experiences as a college student, Jani highlighted the way in which he has since come to the forefront of multiple movements as an organizer, for example, his involvement as the faculty advisor of Ohio State’s Students for Justice in Palestine.

“I don’t have anything coherent at this moment and I think that’s on purpose. It’s because it’s the mood that I’m in, and I want to be true to that feeling,” said Ethnicity, Race, and Migration professor Quan Tran. “This mood of uncertainty as a feeling, but also this mood of feeling desperate — feeling separated, disconnected, feeling a little bit of fear.”

Tran continued by sharing that she refuses to reach a definitive conclusion in her reckoning of fear. In doing so, she said, she is disrupting linearity and accepting her own uncertainty. 

Referencing an Audre Lorde quote, Chris Lapinig, a senior staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, told students that mere existence could be a form of resistance, as well. Furthermore, he emphasized the role of self-care as a political act.

Transitioning from a discussion on forms of resistance to each panelist’s envisioning of a future, just world, Minh Vu — a doctoral candidate in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies — addressed the difficulty of reconciling such imaginations with tangible action. 

“The promise of a just future can easily get away from you and remain just that — a promise and a desire that isn’t ever fulfilled,” said Vu. “The way that we tend to the day-to-day today is also how we tend to tomorrow’s as well.”

Echoing the panel’s theme of transforming uncertainty to action, moderator Michelle Lee discussed her exploration of music through traditional Korean drums as a manifestation of “radical joy.” Lee is a part of the traditional Korean drum collective, UNITY Korean Drum and Dance Troupe. 

Tran also touched on the pursuit of joy under conditions of confusion and fear. She shared an anecdote about a guava tree that she had been wanting to purchase from a tropical fruit tree seller in Florida. 

The tree was imbued with nostalgia for her, she said, and reminded her of the tropical fruits she grew up with in Vietnam. The commitment to caring for the tree for years to come, while not knowing what the future held, presented her with a conundrum. 

“At some point, the urgency cannot sit there and sit for two weeks long anymore,” said Tran. “You make the decision of what it is you are going to commit to, however small, tangible or intangible. Because you can overthink, you can over intellectualize, you still sit in the same place.” 

In the end, Tran decided to purchase the tree. 

The final panel of PAAHM at Yale, “Unpacking ‘AAPI’: Moving From Inclusion to Solidarity in Asian & Pasifika Communities,” will take place on Friday, April 4 at 6:30 p.m. in the AACC Multipurpose Room.