Celebrate AAPI Heritage Month by sharing your story

Everyone has a story, and this month a group of local AAPI women is asking community members to add theirs to a project called Our Stories Are Your Story (#OSAYS).

The OSAYS initiative began just a little over a month ago, when Betti Fujikado, Mimi Gan, Maya Mendoza-Exstrom, Katherine Cheng and Mari Horita came together to discuss what collective action they could take in the face of the horrific Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks on people from the AAPI community. 

The slogan “Stop AAPI Hate” had already been circulating for several months, but Horita said the Seattle group wanted to go deeper and address underlying issues like division and othering. They also sought to deliver an uplifting message in honor of AAPI Heritage Month, celebrated throughout the month of May.

“We wanted to take a slightly different approach that was more about asking, ‘Why is this happening? Why are people hurting each other?’” Horita said. “This is really meant to be a bigger message about humanity than it is about any particular group.”

The team behind Our Stories Are Your Stories (Photo courtesy OSAYS)

The women turned to their personal and professional networks to assemble a mostly AAPI film crew to make a PSA video and also produce short interviews featuring the stories of local AAPI community members. 

Now, it’s your turn. Throughout the month of May, AAPI folks are encouraged to create and share their own DIY videos using the #OSAYS hashtag on social media. Participants can also submit their video stories to the official digital archive at the Wing Luke Museum. (Instructions, video tips and more are available in the OSAYS toolkit.) 

You don’t have to be a camera pro to tell your story. The organizers welcome submissions featuring family members, groups or even self-recorded videos.  

Horita says the goal is to share as many stories as possible, and to build empathy by showing that “not all Asians are alike.”

“Nobody is just one thing; nobody is in a box,” she said. “We’re all in one big box together.”