The Campus Community Book Project’s schedule for next week includes Asian Voices, a collection of performance pieces in which students peel away at their upbringing to offer individual takes on the Asian American experience.

Their journeys bring up issues of family dynamics, body image, gender politics and racism. It is the last of those issues, racism, that makes Asian Voices relevant to this year’s book project: Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race.

Book project coordinator Mikael Villalobos, who has sat in on Asian Voices rehearsals, said: “The performances get very raw, very emotional.”

Asian Voices: Student Performances on Identity, free and open to the public, is scheduled from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 19, in the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

'Greatist hits' from ASA 121

The voices are the “greatest hits” from the course Asian American Pacific Performance (ASA 121), as presented four times since summer 2009 by Alex Luu, a visiting artist and lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies. Luu  is set to perform as well, presenting an excerpt from his one-man show Three Lives.

“I’m a strong proponent of this medium, especially with people of color, and especially in the Asian community, because historically their stories have been misrepresented, stereotyped, and, to a great extent, misappropriated,” Luu said.

The first day of class, he asks his unsuspecting students to ditch their desks, jump around and join him in a circle on the floor.

“I don’t stand there and lecture,” he said. “The truth is, it’s not about me. It’s about what these students can bring to this course. It’s about hearing their stories.”

Luu has been nurturing autobiographical storytelling for nearly 20 years, in his own performance art and in workshops at colleges across the nation.

In working with UC Davis students, Luu said, he feels his work has “really exploded.”

“I’ve completely fallen in love with this campus," he said. "There seems-is-exists such passionate and open-minded energy among the Asian American and Pacific students here.

"They are so on it when it comes to community, activism and being political.”

One of his students, Lyia Jalao, a second-year international relations and Asian American studies double major, is involved in the Hmong Student Union, Vietnamese Student Association and the Asian American Association.

After having taken ASA 121, Jalao said, she has completely changed her outlook on life and is more motivated to continue working with Southeast Asian students.

“I don’t want to ostracize people I don’t know anymore," she said. "Because of this class, I am more open to other people within the community, because I know everyone has something in them, everyone has a different story."

'They want to be challenged'

Luu said he works with college students because of storytelling’s ability to really impact them.

“They are open-minded and actually want to be challenged,” he said.

His students rave about how much they have learned from their self-proclaimed “crazy person with crazy off-the-wall energy.”

But they probably do not realize how much he learned from them, too.

“I’ve never met so many Hmong, Mien and Laotians in my life. There were so many powerful heartbreaking struggles that I learned about this past year,” Luu said.

And yet, he said, these stories have not been told, for the most part.

He said the Asian Voices audience should get ready for an “entertaining, uplifiting, eye-opening and challenging experience.”

“This is no Miss Saigon,” he said. “These are real stories.”

Alex Luu’s website.

Nicole Nguyen is a Dateline intern.

More book project events.